Upside down

Orchestra Lapbook

This was our lapbook for our study of the orchestra. Mrs. Kim, at our homeschool co-op, did a lesson on the orchestra about a month ago. At home, Olivia and I expanded on it. The instruments on the front were some of her favorites. She got to see a violin and a flute, i believe, at the co-op, she wants to play the harp (oh boy, could she have picked a larger, more expense and more complicated instrument?), she got to buzz on the mouthpiece of daddy's french horn (otherwise it doesn't work), and of course, she likes the drums.

This was our bible verse that we memorized. A nice side effect of teaching Olivia memory verses and saying them over and over has been that I am also learning them. I was never good at or very disciplined in this before. God gave us music and the reason we have music is to give praise to God. The pictures below are some of the books we read as well as a DVD we watched. We also used the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Kids website a lot because you can listen to most of the instruments individually.

We talked about what an orchestra was, who the conductor was and what he did.


We talked about how a composer creates music. We listened to Saint-Saens' "The Carnival of the Animals". We talked about the particular instruments used to represent each animal. Jeremy joined in to lead this part of our study. Olivia really enjoyed this activity. We also listened to parts of Handel's Messiah. This was done not only as a part of the orchestra study but also as a part of our lent activities. My friend referred me to a great website that had activities to do for each day of lent. Each day Olivia opens an Easter egg with an activity in it. I may post more about that later. One of them was to listen to Handel's Messiah. So I rigged it so that she would draw that activity around the same time we were doing this lapbook.


We identified the families of instruments in the orchestra. This is where we listened to each instrument individually. There are flash cards for the instruments we talked about in these pockets.

Here is the animals and instruments for "The Carnival of the Animals".

We talked about how the musicians sit with their instruments in an orchestra. This chart was from co-op where the exercise was to color the instrument group as it was heard. When we are riding in the car and listening to music, Olivia will often tell us what instruments she hears playing or ask if she doesn't know. We heard a fiddle song in the car tonight and she said it sounded like a violin. We also went to see the "Word of Life German Brass ensemble" at church tonight. They were playing trumpets and trombones. There was so much more we could have done with this study. I can't wait to build on it at a later time. Some instruments we always have with us like our hands and our voices. We have also been learning some musical terms like adagio (slow), allegro (fast), piano (soft), and forte (loud) as she plays her toy instruments at home. We use all kinds of music for this including some of the Kindermusik CDs we have from when we took those classes together last year. Jeremy is also starting to work on some finger exercises with her in hopes of teaching her piano before long. We will be learning right along with her if we are able to do this.

Here is the Sarine garage band! Olivia is holding her homemade drum and string instrument. She made this at co-op. Gabe has his drum that he is learning how to bang on. He uses both hands and feet. Olivia has a great time "making music" with her brother. She also likes to assign me an instrument to play with them.

Winter Lapbook

Since winter is almost over...:)

This was our winter lapbook we did in January. I have had the pictures for a while and just never got around to posting it. So here it is for you. Olivia cut out the snowflakes and painted them with glitter glue.

Olivia did not memorize this bible verse. (She has about 16 other verses memorized) It isn't easy to find verses to go with our topics sometimes. We read it a lot. We talked about how God gives us seasons. We talked about what months are winter. In the "S is for snow" book, she had to pick out Ss. We also worked on writing Ss and it was around this time that she learned to write her last name.

We talked about weather and read lots of books on this topic. Since we are in NC, we talked about rain and ice as well as snow. :) Fortunately she did get to see some snow.

We read a poem with some vocabulary words. She had to trace the words, although that is not pictured here. Olivia cut and pasted circles to make a snowman and drew a face on him. She has not taken quickly to drawing or coloring so this was a difficult activity for her. She does love to cut though. The snowflakes on this page are painted with colored epsom salts.

This was an activity she did at our homeschool coop. We spent time at home talking about appropriate dress for winter weather since she has often put on her sandals to go out this winter. :)

This picture is another activity she did at our coop. I wanted to include this one so you could see how she writes her name. Although, in the last two weeks, she can write her full name now. I will have to take a picture of that soon.

I put this picture of the tree without its leaves on the back of her lapbook because one of the things she says a lot is that the trees are sad without their leaves. Again she painted snow with the epsom salts. Its a messy craft but fun too!

Posting bonanza

OK, there is a flood of posts this morning. I've fallen behind on the pictures we've been taking, so I've gone ahead and added everything at once. Enjoy!

Gabe Sleeping

Imagine finding this when you go in to wake him up:

After I checked to make sure he was breathing, I had to leave the room to keep from laughing out loud.

Winter Wonderland

Well, The weathermen got it right! We got 6" of beautiful snow overnight.

Olivia and I went out and made a snowman to bring inside and observe what happens. Olivia's hypothesis is that he will "lose his air."

We brought him in at 9:00am, put peppercorns on him for eyes, a nose and buttons.

By 9:15, he'd lost one eye, his nose and a button.

9:30: Olivia says, "He's melting into water!"

9:45: "He's dancing!"

10:00

10:15

10:30: We came down just in time to see his head fall off.

10:30: closeup

10:45: He's fallen over.

11:00: "he's getting smaller"

11:15: not much left

11:30: "He fell in the water"

Olivia and Gabe pics

Rebecca got a couple of cute shots of the kiddos.

Gabe in the bathtub

Gabe is so different from Olivia when it comes to the bath! She used to cry and wail when she was his age and he loves to kick and splash. I guess it's just being a boy. :)

Rebecca's Final Project

Rebecca and her friend, Kim, took a cake decorating class at Michael's over the last 4 weeks and this is what she can do now! Sadly, we didn't get to eat this one. She brought it to work and it disappeared in 20 minutes, so it must have been good.