Music Unit Celebration

We had a fun celebration at the end of our enormous Music Unit. It felt like we needed to do something good to celebrate learning so much stuff. :)

I must say that the Kit-Kat piano keyboard (with all 88 keys) was the biggest hit. Daisy assembled it for me. I was worried at the last moment that I wouldn't be able to find white Kit-kats at the store, but I finally did—whew!

The rest of the menu was:

• Bugles

• Those little flute-shaped cookies, whatever they're called. (EDIT: Piroulines!)

• Music notes made of meat (this was Sam's idea—bacon, salami, and sausage sticks make a nice music note)

• Music notes made of cherry tomatoes and basil and olives and mozzarella balls (these were my favorites)

• Music notes made of cherry sour candies and toothpicks

• Drum mallets made of pretzels and marshmallows (we stuck them together with homemade caramel sauce)

• Black-and-white make-your-own piano-key sandwiches (we just had turkey and ham and roast beef on white and pumpernickel bread)

I put out some musical instruments to play: this tiny steel drum and this little thumb piano.

I also got a conducting baton for each of the children, and a tiny egg maraca. (These batons broke way too easily, but these have lasted well!)

We played some "Name-that-tune" sorts of games, and watched the Fred Astaire movie "Shall We Dance," the one with such great music by Gershwin in it. It was so fun!

The conductor's batons got a lot of use over the next few weeks :)

Daisy made a cardboard music stand to use with hers.

The Calico Critters got in on the musical action too.

Even Gussie liked to lead "mine concert"!

Music History Unit

This year has been a funny one! It started out with the birth of our sweet baby Clementine—on the first day of school! (Public school, anyway.) We had been banking up school time during the previous year and summer so I could feel fine about taking a nice long break for the baby. When we did start school again, I decided to start with something I could put together easily and without a ton of preparation time, so I chose to do a Music History Unit.

I majored in Music in college, so I have a lot of resources—CDs and textbooks, and a pretty good grasp of the overall scope of Music History, so I hoped all I'd need to do was request some library books and find good recordings of the pieces I wanted to discuss.

It ended up being a MONSTER Unit, over twelve weeks long, because we first studied Sound—then Instruments—then Musical Eras and Composers—then Musical Genres—and even got to ballet and opera and movie music by the end. It was pretty comprehensive! And it was lots of fun. It took a bit longer than I'd planned, but it was, as I'd hoped, just the right thing for a unit right after having a baby: lots of opportunities for just sitting in my bed and listening and talking, and not too many heavily involved crafts or projects.

A few of the activities we did do are on my Pinterest page, here: https://www.pinterest.com/marilynnielson/music-unit/

I can't even possibly link to all the videos we watched—basically I chose representative music from each era and highlighted composers, and we listened to sometimes several versions of one piece. I pulled from my faithful old Norton Scores from college, but also other music in our collection, or Apple Music. We also watched lots of video recordings because it's so instructive to SEE the music being played. (It would have been great to go to more concerts during this unit, but there were still lots of Covid closures plus the aforementioned new baby, so we didn't really get to.)

Anyway, I went through my YouTube History and tried to pull out videos that we liked especially, but I'm sure I missed a bunch. But I'll link some of them here:

• What does a vibraphone sound like?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkBu7Om6Bd4 (there were a whole bunch of these instrument/timbre videos on the Utah Symphony page and they were quite good; you can find the rest here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/UtahSymphonyUtahOpera/videos?view=0&sort=p&shelf_id=0)

• Other videos about each instrument in the orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLALV7z7CDQ7yCWoOvUK4mOMAE4ub_h0TG

• How vinyl records are made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq5EDXNe-HQ&t=131s

• History of recorded sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mb6y_s1QQc&t=220s

• How do microphones work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_crXXbuEKE

• Can you hear me now?: How microphones work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MaH5V0UomE

• Sound and waves demonstrations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De1J2V0Cta4

• Electron microscope and the path of the needle in a vinyl LP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUDclkJpMfo

• Note by note: The Making of a Steinway Piano. This is a one-hour documentary we really liked—we've watched it before, during our Percussion Unit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rAhps4AkT8

• That Sound and Percussion Unit is summarized in these posts, and goodness! It seems like it happened recently, but look at these tiny children!

Benjamin Britten's "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (I love this and there are many good recordings of it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMGqdUqPnmo

• A very dramatic (and shortened) "Bolero," which the children liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwLABSm0yYc

• Peter and the Wolf—I mostly chose this because it had some storybook-ish pictures, but there are probably better recordings. Peter and the Wolf is always good, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ueGfjBKbiE&t=1s

• Demonstration of different trumpet mutes—so interesting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9F5DaxIUcQ&t=19s

• This is fun. "Tuba Tiger Rag" by the Canadian Brass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7IraO35qu8

• Demonstration of a celeste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw7HAyq54rw&t=4s

• This one is super cool—"How do vocal cords work when you sing?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2pLJfWUjc8

• A little advanced. Wish I could've found a simpler explanation. "What is a fugue?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAFETgpt9PA&t=157s

• Royal Fireworks Music, with fireworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuG1t2smdCQ

• La Boutique Fantastique, a fun short ballet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_D3JHR8emE

• Dance of the Cygnets, from Swan Lake. The girls were dancing in Swan Lake with their ballet studio for this year, so it was fun to watch a bunch of clips from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsajWIF3ws

• Weird opera by Shostakovich, "The Nose." I don't know why we watched these strange tap-dancing noses, but we did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YotMwwixPsw

• The importance of instrumentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEpJZDUwOTI

• Understanding the leitmotif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR2EobBG9wQ

• A couple fun cartoons that use classical music: "Pink Panther in Pink, Plunk, Plink" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiA6qe5S2wU and "Tom and Jerry: The Cat Concerto" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZgi06fVsk

• Star Wars Leitmotifs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExbps1JofI

• A history of minimalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3VUeNyGcrQ&t=464s

• Clapping Music—Steve Reich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPU5XrmORCQ

• When film music is funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Lpqk_3ero

We ended up covering Jazz, Opera, and Ballet during this unit, and each of those could have been a whole unit in themselves—so we just did brief overviews. It would be fun to return to any of them and go more in depth!

We had a couple of great guest speakers—my neighbor taught us about Jazz (she majored in Vocal Jazz in college) and my cousin Heidi gave us a workshop on the pipe organ. Both of those classes were really great. Here are some pictures from the Organ class:

These make me nostalgic because we had Abe with us on this field trip! He was the one taking the pictures. It seems so long ago!

Revolutionary War Unit Activities

Even though we learned this last time, I'd forgotten how to make a five-pointed star with one cut! Betsy Ross would be ashamed of me. So, we learned again! (I even used it in my primary class the next week…it fit with the lesson somehow.) You can find lots of tutorials for how to do this. We used this one.

Junie got quite good at it! Big and tiny star.

Daisy decided to make a whole flag and was surprised at how much work it took to get all the stars arranged right, the stripes to be the right width, etc.

We got to visit my friend's house again and have us show us her spinning wheel, etc.

We wrote messages with invisible ink and then (somewhat clumsily) put them over a candle flame to reveal them.

We got a real sealing wax kit from Amazon and it was fun to use! You melt the little sticks of wax over a flame and then use the stamp to press them over the fold of your letter. They looked really pretty!

Ziggy was suitably impressed.

The minuteman game we played last time was so much fun that we did it again. This time the children had to get on all their clothes and run around the house with their musket. We timed everyone and then they tried to beat their times. There was LOTS of laughter. Especially because the boots and coats they were using were so big and hard to run in!

We loved learning about Ben Franklin's glass armonica, and making a similar one ourselves. Getting the glass armonica to work was surprisingly hard! Sebastian had gotten really good at it last time, but for awhile I was convinced we had the wrong kind of glasses because we could not get a single sound out of them! (I don't actually think you have to have any certain kind of glasses, but it sure was hard at first!) It took us a good twenty minutes of trying (unsuccessfully) before we produced some sound, and another ten minutes before being able to get anything to work reliably. Junie persevered for a long time and eventually became quite good, and then all the other children were impressed and became more patient themselves too. I think everyone was able to play pretty well by the end of the day!

Junie reinvented the wheel and made this music notation sheet so she could play a song more than once, and remember which levels to fill the glasses to.

Here are some videos that demonstrate the glass armonica being played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKlRUvk9zc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQemvyyJ--g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSK_qObahWY (this one is from Mr. Rogers--it's cute)

Inventors and Inventions Unit

click to enlarge

Coming back from a new baby, I wanted to teach a unit that didn't need a ton of preparation. This one was perfect. We read a bunch of books about cool and funny inventions, talked about the technologies involved, played with some of the inventions we read about (like Slinkies and Super Soakers), and then I let the children do a lot of designing and iterating on their own inventions throughout the unit.

This is a really good resource for hands-on activities that help teach kids good design principles. I think they must be from a TV Show? It's called "Design Squad."

If you click on the link at the top left of that page, where it says "Videos," there are some fun videos showing the design process as well. Our favorites were the ones, like this one, where a dad engineers toys out of cardboard for his toddler son.

My brother is a patent attorney, and I would have loved to have him come as a Guest Speaker for our unit, but he lives in California. So we did the next best thing—a Skype call while he talked us through a PowerPoint presentation he'd made and sent ahead of time. It was so interesting! He's so good at explaining things and making complicated concepts seem simple. My older boys, especially, were fascinated and kept asking questions. He taught us about intellectual property and all its sub-categories—patents, copyrights, trademarks, and so forth.

Pictured above, we are on the call with him—a pretty typical picture of our homeschool with half the children in pajamas, me nursing a baby, people climbing all over each other, etc.

These are some "musical instruments" the children invented/built one day:

Gem Institute and Music Museum Field Trips

Since we were going to be in Carlsbad for the Flower Fields, we set up field trips at the Gem Institute and the Museum of Making Music while we were there. Both places take homeschool group tours, but you have to schedule in advance. At the Gem Institute you have to go past the guard booth and show your ID, which makes you feel kind of important. The tower on the front of the building has this beautiful sparkling crystal in the top.

It's not a huge museum, and none of my pictures are very good, but we loved seeing all the beautiful minerals and gems! This crystal pendant was hanging in the front window, and what you can't tell from the picture is that it's HUGE—probably as tall as Daisy. There are beautiful colored inclusions in the quartz, and when the sun comes through, it makes rainbow patterns on the walls and floor.

They did have some things the kids were allowed to touch. Hooray!

There were some interesting works of art made from gemstones—carved pieces like these, and others.

One of my favorite things was this display of orchestral instruments, all carved from precious stones.

I loved this. It's called Ametrine, and it's only found in one area of the world, where the minerals amethyst (the purple one) and citrine (the yellow one) occur naturally together. The sign said that at first, gemologists usually cut and faceted the stones with yellow on one side and purple on the other, but now they've found ways to cut them where the two colors join and blend, to give a more modern, free-form look. Aren't they all beautiful?

We always love malachite!

The display of opals was really beautiful. The museum had a birthstone exhibit that these were part of.

A rainbow of gemstones! I'll take one of each, please.

Our next stop, the Museum of Making Music, was great too. We had a whole tour and class, led by Mr. Bill (or Mr. Bob? or something like that) who was such a nice, friendly man. (He seemed greatly disappointed in us when none of the kids had heard of Elvis Presley, though.) First he had us sit in a drum circle and let the kids take turns conducting us. Adam LOVED that, as you can see.

So did Ben.

So did Daisy!

And at the end of the museum tour, there was a room with a whole bunch of different instruments the kids could try out! It was a little nerve-racking for Allison and me, keeping track of all ten of them and making sure no one dropped or broke anything, but the kids loved it!

Note Teddy in background, waving a zither or some such thing around

This was a great culmination of our Sound and Percussion Unit!