Checketts and Music and Art Week

 First, General Conference. We watch the leaders of our Church speak via broadcast twice a year.  There are 4 sessions, two hours each, making 8 hours where I expect my kids to pay attention as much as they can to learn what we believe and how to live a better, Christ-centered life. This year, I found a cute idea on the internet to keep the kids engaged. We always use packets of coloring sheets, but my kids usually need a little more incentive. This year, we set up this dollar store. They started out with two "conference bucks" each. If the misbehaved, they lost the dollars. If they behaved, during the hymns, they could go over to the store and cash in their money. It worked well, until the last 2 hours. But hey, you do what you can do. Dottie later recorded in one of the packets that her favorite part of conference was "spending the fake money."

This week, I am watching the 3 boys of my friend, Jessica.  In an effort to keep things sane, I decided to keep informal school going. We had Music and Art week. Really, it's not that hard or impressive what I did, but it went really well. I've been playing them clips of classical music while they paint, then I either show them a video clip or talk about what the song is called and what the composer intended. I don't tell them the title ahead of time so I can get their true impression. I was going to make it more complex, talking about the composer's life, but that is a little too much for this crowd.

This was the first song we did, Night on Bald Mountain. Then, I showed them the clip from "Fantasia." I think the demon freaked them out a bit. But then, Russel said he wanted to be that demon for Halloween.

Watching 6 children means creating many activities throughout the day in an organized fashion. We made chocolate chips one day, and I've been divvying them out as rewards ever since. Each child wanted to "help," of course. In order to make this possible, I looked at the directions and assigned each of them one thing to dump in the bowl. And then no one got to lick the bowl. Okay, so maybe I took a fingerful or two.

This was the children hard at work painting The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Sweet Oliver. After the first day, I bought each child their own set of watercolors. That was money well spent to avoid arguments over people mixing the colors.

Elliot. So maybe he's seen the movie before.

Russel. These were soldiers fighting.

Oliver. Water.

And Dottie, of course, remembered the movie.

These next pictures are from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, The Witch's Sabbath movement. Elliot called this painting "Nature."

Dottie's was a Halloween scene, with this human trying to escape the monsters.

James, the three-year-old's painting. A pretty accurate depiction, don't you think?

Oliver's paintings all have a Rothko-esque style, don't you think?

And Russel's was an alien and his ship. This was from yesterday. They loved painting so much yesterday that we listened not only to Symphonie Fantastique but also The Old Mill from Disney's Silly Symphony and Copeland's Rodeo (just Hoedown). This has been a really fun week, and I've forgotten how much I love listening to classical music and doing something creative.