making music with color

This awesome idea came to me from Nettle's Notes, via Crafty Crow (see my sidebar), and I decided to try it out with the girls before attempting it with the homeschool choir/music class that Dan and I lead.

First we assembled a collection of jars (we used six, which seemed manageable) - three for each girl.  With chopsticks, they tapped on the jars for a while, figuring out what part of the jar made what kind of noise, and which jars made the lowest sound, which the highest.  As you can see from Eliza's face, just this activity was a delight!

Each girl also had a small pitcher of water, and they began experimenting with filling, playing and emptying the jars.  Finally they had each settled on sounds they liked - my only requirements were that each jar had some water, and no two pitches were the same.

Next they worked together on putting the jars in order, according to pitch, highest to lowest.  It was helpful when the pitches were close together for us to match the pitches with our voices - this made it clearer to the girls which was higher, and which lower.

And now for the color! Each girl chose three colors from our set of watercolors, and began dying the water in the jars with the colors.  Now each jar had its own pitch and color.

I had prepared a couple of sheets of paper with empty "notes" for the girls to fill in with paint.  With all six colors at hand, they commenced to painting in their notes.  Interestingly, because I had followed Nettle's example and made my notes along a line (which I liked, as it reminds me of a note on a line of a staff of sheet music), the notes were all divided in two, which led to the girls choosing two colors for some of their notes. They alternately played two jars at a time, like a chord, or kind of trilled the notes, playing the two jars back and forth for a beat or two - it was beautiful!

The hardest part of this activity was taking turns, but once we got to actually playing the music and not just experimenting with the sounds chopsticks make on jars, tables, chairs, etc, the girls were respectful and enjoyed listening to each other.  It also helped that I dubbed myself "conductor" and  had the power to start and stop the sounds if I needed to for a moment!

 This piece of Eliza's was interesting - she went back and forth between playing the chorded notes (in a kind of trill) and single notes - it was nice to see a pattern emerging.  Initially, the girls approached this part as an art project, rather than a music project, just painting colors in a way that was pleasing to them. It was only after the first "composition" that Eliza chose to work on a pattern or melody.

We'll definitely do this again, and I'm interested in figuring out if this is too large and messy a project for our choir class...it would really complement the things we are doing nicely!

What We're Doing

I know, that's a catchy title for a post, but I thought while I'm figuring out the bigger picture of our fall, I'd let you in on some of the day-to-day, which has been quite interesting and entertaining...

Last week we made Fraction Kits, an idea from a book we use for math games, called Family Math.  The girls thought this activity was the bees' knees, and Eliza said, "This is math????? It's so much FUN! If I'm ever a teacher, this is definitely the way I'm going to teach math." Glow. (Come on, you've got to savor these moments, right?!)

Using 5 strips of the same length, we in turn folded them in half once, in half twice, in half three times, etc., each time guessing before unfolding just how many new "parts" there would be.  You cannot believe how exciting this part was...After halves and quarters, Eliza's next guess was that our three foldings would yeild six parts, which I thought was very logical, but then by the 16ths, she had caught on.  Then you label them, and finally cut them along their folds. Voila, Fraction Kit.

The game part comes (what? there's more??) when  you either roll a fancy die that we do not have that says 1/2, 1/4, 2/8, etc, or you write the fractions on little pieces of paper and take turns drawing them out of a bowl, hoping to eventually cover your one strip that remains whole before someone else does...They asked me today if we can make another kit.

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A friend of mine recommended a book that she has actually never had in her possession but has looked for since her children, now teenagers, were little.  Lo and behold, Dan was able to get it from the University Library, and it is a wonderful book that I covet:  Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years.  Sobel talks about connecting children to the place they are instead of overwhelming them with the abstract bigger picture, memorizing places and names that are not linked to their world in any way.  Basically, begin with your home, your neighborhood, the places you are familiar with, and then broaden the scope. Likewise, begin with three dimensional models - blocks or other material - then move to pictorial maps.  Play with maps, make treasure hunts, map your adventures, your stories. I love this book.  So we took one of the ideas from it and had fun one morning, creating a map of our living room with blocks, hiding an object in the room, and marking on the model the place where the object was hidden.  When I had been the map maker a few times, the girls took over, making maps independently of the kitchen and the playroom, and hiding things for me to find.  I have heard Anika begin to describe things very carefully in a cartographic way (I made that word up), taking her listener with her using a verbal map, and I can tell that she is envisioning things in a more specific and relational (is that a word?) way.  It is cool, and I am inspired to do more with his ideas.

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Besides all that, there is some game-making...

...some creating...

...some hanging out with royalty.

The usual.

Spinning

We are in the midst of two weeks of beginnings - classes, gatherings, patterns, relationships - and I am too in the heart of it to be able to reflect as I feel I am needing to...Details are falling into place for our various new commitments, but there are other facets that are needing more attention - not the where and how but the connections we are making or are trying to forge with people.

This has never been a difficult aspect of life for me, but it seems that during this season of late summer and early fall I am immersed in the more complicated layers of Relationship.   Some of it is personal, and most of it has to do with how to balance your personal relationships with the greater community web.  This is challenging me and I am feeling unsettled much of the time, anxious and taking great care before stepping my next step.

I am grateful for enough perspective to see this as a challenge of this moment, hoping that it will lead me to a deeper understanding of how things work between members of a community who may not see eye-to-eye but have a common goal in mind.  

I am torn between the  high spinning  of anxious feelings and the draw towards being still and waiting, listening, at a time of year when I am usually off and running, spurred on by the winds and the swirling motion of fall...

I am trusting that by moving slowly and listening for clarity, threads will untangle and we can begin the work of enjoying fully the glory of this season.

Making a crocheted rug

Do you have any old t-shirts lying around? Wondering what to do with them? Read on...

I made a crocheted rug out of old clothes as a present for my sister last Christmas, but I never got a very good photo of it.  It was such a satisfying project on so many levels; I feel like many of the "crafty" things I get around to doing aren't producing anything very functional, and there is something so nice about creating something that looks good and is useful.  I initially started by thinking that I would cut up several of my niece's old dresses and shirts that Ani has outgrown as hand-me-downs, but then I realized that my sister might not have need of a very very pink rug in her home.  So I went to my next pile of old clothes waiting their reincarnation - t-shirts.  I have seen people use old sheets for this project, but they tend to fray and leave lots of little threads everywhere.  T-shirts roll nicely, hiding their edges, and feel nice and plump under your feet when you're done...

Eliza and I are embarking on making a couple of rugs this fall - one for her room and one for an undisclosed recipient who reads this blog...(ahem)  I at first thought she would help me prep the material and then do a stitch or two as she felt like it, but she caught on right away just by watching me and I don't know that I'll get to do another stitch!  Here is a basic how-to...

Talk your family members into donating their old t-shirts for your cause.  If you can't assemble enough, or wish to have a wider variety of color, head to the thrift store - ours sells cotton t-shirts for 50 cents a piece (hint: look for the XXL).  I will also include a few shirts in prints because they look nice.  Cut your shirts starting at the bottom, and spiraling up all the way to the arm-pits (and through the sleeves if you wish).  You are aiming for about an inch and a half width, but it does not have to be exact.

Even this is a step that both of my kids enjoyed and wanted to help with. (Eliza is wearing Dan's old Phish shirt that he donated...we'll have to see if I get it back)

This step is not absolutely necessary, but it is nice to plan a bit ahead and have several shirts cut up before you begin.  Rolling the long piece of shirt is a coveted job apparently - during our evening story time the girls take turns helping me roll the pieces while Dan reads.

 

And here is just a close-up of the hair-do Eliza recently invented.
She is so darn cool.

Here is our current stash of material, ready to be crocheted.  We started working on it tonight, while listening to Dragon Rider (we're almost done).

Ani is rolling while Eliza crochets. You want to use the largest crochet hook you can find - I believe this one is a 15mm hook, available at any craft store.  The movement of working with this size of material and hook is really large and physical, which might be what appeals to Eliza.

It also goes quickly, producing a good size for standing on at the kitchen sink, or next to your bed, or in the bathroom, in just a few sittings.  I would love to make a braided rug like the ones my grandparents always had in their homes (we also  have one, handed down from a friend).  They actually made several themselves out of thrifted woolens, which I would like to try some day maybe with help from the girls when they're older.  This rug is a project that is within my realm of ability and time right now.

the rug for Eliza's room

close-up of the other rug (you can see where we are using something 

other than a t-shirt; sometimes sentimentality wins out over a little bit of fraying!)

Is it Fall yet?

Every day Eliza asks me this question.  So we talk about what we see and feel going on around us...leaves beginning to yellow, leaves beginning to fall...plants going to seed...

Queen Anne's Lace

We look for flowers that blossom at this time of year...

Thistles!

There is a crab spider hiding in this one - can you see him?

And we spotted this one with her dinner!

While the calendar has become an important part of Eliza's world - she checks it every day and adds new events to it constantly - I am interested in her knowing herself whether or not it is Fall.  Today we worked on the autumn quarter of a season wheel, depicting what we've observed happening out there in the world. We'll add to it I guess as the season progresses, using stamps, drawings, words...

 Ani's season circle, fall quarter

Eliza's season circle, fall quarter

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Sunday evening we hosted a potluck for Dan's program-mates.  It was great!! The girls were wonderful hostesses, there was amazing food to be shared, and we enjoyed an impromptu salsa dancing lesson from one of Dan's Columbian classmates.  Eliza thrives in this company, and I was happy to see that my day with Ani set her up well for enjoying herself with the 25 or so guests that showed up.  I had a trying moment with the spouse of one of the students who was incredulous that we homeschool our children.  How do we motivate them to learn, if not with grades? Surely they do not learn simply because they are curious? And what about missing all of that time with their peers? And what will I do when they need to learn higher mathematics and physics???? How I wished I could pull out a Masters degree in physics right about then...Oh well, he's got me there, doesn't he.  I didn't know how to begin to explain that I consider everything we do to be a part of our homeschool curriculum, including the dancing Eliza was doing with his wife in the other room right at that moment; the conversations the girls were having with intelligent people from several other countries; the game of checkers he played with Eliza later that evening...

After all this Sunday evening homeschooling,  we took it easy on Monday, playing in the morning and then packing a lunch to take with us on the hike.  We settled under a favorite beech tree to read more of The Wind Boy.  We have been watching segments of David Attenborough's Secret Life of Plants, and Eliza noticed these lobelia flowers along our hike:

She noted that they practically have arrows emblazoned on their lower petals, as if to say "enter here".  We had to hang out for a while to watch while the bees visited and rubbed their backs against the sticky stamen.  We hoped they had pollen to share...

Connecting

Yesterday was a day I stole from Real Time, to re-calibrate with my youngest daughter, to borrow a word from Ms. OLM.  It has been clear to me for the last week of being home that we have been out of alignment, missing the mark, not connecting, and though the day's plans involved more Appalachian golf for Dan and precious time with dear friends for us girls, my heart was screaming, "STOP!" - this isn't working, this can't keep going in this direction, gotta change something here...So, Ani and I stayed home while Dan and Eliza went without us.  

It was a really hard decision to make, derailing our plans like that, and it was rough for the first 10 minutes. Ten minutes.  A day of healing is well worth ten minutes of deep empathy, active listening and riding-it-out, in my opinion.  Ten minutes for a day of talking, laughing, thinking, considering, snuggling, talking, listening, and snuggling some more.  We painted. We read. We built. We snacked. We walked to the garden and there she invited me to sit in the shade with her before we headed back home...

Carefully, she unpacked her bag of her dearest treasures.

I soaked up every peaceful moment with this child of mine.  Every thought shared and every kind gesture...It has felt stormy around here and it was deeply restorative to be reminded of love and yes and peace in each others' presence.  Today was not smooth sailing, but we had something to fall back on, some new memories of how it can work.

Friday My Town Shoot-Out: Graffiti

Friday My Town Shoot Out gives photographers an opportunity to share images from their town and area, following a weekly theme.  This week's theme is Graffiti.  Please visit here to see more interpretations of the theme and a mini trip around the world...These photos are taken in and around Athens, Ohio.

My husband teaches a class each quarter at the university that poses the question, "what is art?".  Graffiti provides good ground for this discussion - when is public painting an artistic mural and when is it graffiti? Is graffiti defined by its illegal status? I guess so...I'm not sure how illegal these samples of graffiti I found are, but I really enjoyed stumbling across them in the woods nearby...

This pirate grinned above the swimming hole we visited...

These remains of an old railroad bridge looked much better as mythical creatures.  This bit of railroad, turned into hiking trail, used to pass by the village of Moonville.  There are house foundations here and there in the forest.  The area is thought to be haunted by some of the former residents.

We didn't spot any ghosts, just this octopus smiling over the creek.

The trail follows through the Moonville tunnel; the hotspot of the hauntings, it is also the psychedelic center of the graffiti apparently...lots and lots of mushrooms.

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This is a big university town; the population of 8,000 swells by 20,000 every fall when the undergrads arrive. There is definitely more graffiti around town, but much of it is centered on a sanctioned "graffiti wall", which daily boasts new information regarding Greek parties or specially-themed weeks on campus - but its official status as a place where graffiti is allowed makes me wonder...is it really graffiti??

 photo by Dan

This is the train car that we walk to along the bikepath. It sits next to a working farm, and occasionally the chickens get loose and run around it.  It also houses some bee hives for a local apiarist.  It seems like this public chunk of metal is the perfect spot for some personal expression...In fact, I didn't find any examples of really obnoxious or obscene graffiti - it all feels rather benign and even friendly. Ah, Athens.

My last image comes from our neighborhood...

...it is still one of my favorite instances of graffiti, and of course it has long since been replaced by a boring old sign that simply orders you to Stop.  I pass by this sign nearly every day, and Journey flows through my mind...