Author Archives: Heather

Ensembles

I don’t think a day goes by at our house when we don’t hear one of the girls’ violin pieces. If it isn’t the girls practising it is likely that one of us will be singing or humming one of the tunes. The Suzuki method is based on learning through hearing first. When B6 was born we were listening to cd 1 &2 regularly so he listened along with us. Very early on in his life he was able to sing the songs from the repertoire in tune.

On Sunday we were able to listen to close to 100 students from Suzuki Music, the school we belong to. Once the children have mastered the first few Suzuki books in their private lessons they are given the opportunity to participate in orchestras and ensembles. L12 currently helps out in one of the first orchestras, for the members it is their first opportunity to play in an ensemble. Orchestra 2 is more advanced and it was their fundraising concert that we were attending. Each year Orchestra 2 travels to Montreal and does a couple of school concerts and some sightseeing. Last year A10 was a member of this orchestra.

Orchestra 2 had invited all the ensembles in the school to perform. The parent playing groups, the junior and senior flute ensembles, three junior orchestras and Stellae Boreales all contributed to a great program. We could see the progression possible for students in the school. Stellae Boreales, which L12 and A10 belong to is a violin choir. The standard is quite advanced and repertoire varied and exciting. Both our girls are enjoying the experience of learning and playing with the group. And we are enjoying listening.

New strategy

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We had a decent snowfall yesterday, about 15cm. It made for fairly heavy shoveling though, as it was not light fluffy snow, it was wet and mixed with ice pellets. The children and I tackled it twice and got it all cleared before Andrew came home. During the night the plow came through and cleared the street, leaving a mountain at the end of the driveway. This is all quite normal and manageable, except on the days when you leave the house to head to a violin lesson 15 minutes before the lesson is due to start and then find the mountain of snow at the end of the driveway which you know will take at least 20 minutes to clear and the lesson is 15 minutes away.

Today Andrew planned to clear it before I headed out. A10 went out first and was making a good start on it when a truck with plow attached came down the street. This was not a city plow just a contractor who clears people’s driveways. He saw our young ten year old digging away at the mountain and took pity on her. In a moment it was cleared away and she was smiling back at him. I have often been out shoveling the mountain when a truck with plow has gone by and never has one stopped for me.

So the new strategy is to send the young girl out with the shovel and if that stops working we have a younger, smaller child we can send out.

As the shoveling was done she was able to work on the real project, building forts. B6 came out, as did his friend across the road. This impressive castle now stands in the yard across the street. I believe most of the work was done by our neighbour, aided and abetted by the children.

The top 100 books

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The Top 100 books
Compiled by the Telegraph from the results of a survey asking British readers what were ten books they could not live without. The Common Room and Dominion Family are also featuring it. The ones I have read are bold, the ones I’d like to read are italicized. There are a few I think I might have read but I’m not sure, must have been memorable!? Quite a few I’ve never heard of.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8= Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

8= His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Shakespeare

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“Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”
“I do bite my thumb, sir.”

This was the quote of the day, yesterday, when we began our Shakespeare unit with the Group of Four. We started the afternoon with an insult delivery contest. Two children at a time were given a page of Shakespearean insults and they had 30 seconds to choose one and then deliver it with as much style or venom as they could muster. Most of them were barely able to control their laughter, so I don’t believe anyone’s feelings were hurt. If you feel the urge to insult anyone in true Shakespearean style look here.

We did manage to move on from insulting each other to the consideration of figurative language, writers’ styles and ‘what’s in a name?’ The youngest children also made puppets and the older children wrote news headlines for some of the play’s main events. We gathered ideas from a couple of very helpful sites, The Folger Shakespeare Library and The Acting Company

Once again we benefited from the first hand experience of one of our families’ uncles. (Yes it was the same family who provided the aunt and uncle who had been to Ecuador) This time they called their uncle who is an actor and has acted in and directed various Shakespeare plays. He left a message on their answering machine which we listened to; excerpts of a couple of Romeo’s speeches.

To prepare for this unit at least three of the families read retellings of Romeo and Juliet. A10 and L12 read the Charles and Mary Lamb version. I read the Edith Nesbit version to B6. Now they are only interested in the lines as Shakespeare wrote them. It has been exciting to see their enthusiasm for the play grow and their interest in Shakespeare’s life and times. As our family is studying the Renaissance and Reformation this year we will be delving into more of the bard’s life and work.

Free is better

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A friend of mine once said that while “cheap is good, free is better”.

National Gallery Concert: Violinist Kyoko Takezawa in concert with pianist Akira Eguchi. L12 and A10 went with their dad.
National Arts Centre Open Rehearsal, Pinchas Zukerman on violin, Hubbard St Dance Company, Mozart selections. The children and I attend these open rehearsals about once a month. The NAC Orchestra plays and a soloist or group is featured. We have seen Pinchas Zukerman play several times but have also enjoyed watching Hilary Hahn and other visiting performers for free.

Longest Skating rink in the world-free

Watching our friend”s face when she hears that she won first prize for her short story in the OPL Awesome Author contest-priceless

Eco-tourism delivers

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With some regret we ended the eco-tourism simulation game on Thursday. It was certainly not going badly, quite the opposite. The children were taking hold of it and calling each other during the week to share ideas and make preparations. We could probably have done with one more week.

When we met this week the eco-tourism specialists explained to the village members that the positions advertised had not all been filled, so there would be quite a bit of building and developing going on, but there would also be a little bit of profit left to be shared. Just about the whole village was involved in some way in the day to day running of the tourism project this round. Only two people were farming full time and one part time. One of these farmers had chosen to continue to farm in hope of high prices for her crops, which would then get her out of debt. She was not disappointed.

One of the main topics of discussion at the village meeting was cottage industry. Many people wished to supplement their income by making things and selling them. Lemonade, pottery, rainforest trail mix and woven placemats were all suggested and the potter expressed interest in running the project. Had we continued, everyone may have left farming and worked with the eco-tourism project in some way.

We discussed our initial goals of meeting the village members financial and social needs and halting the clearing of primary rainforest. Everyone could see that, although in four rounds the rainforest had not become too depleted, if people had continued to farm in the same way they would have needed to clear more land. Sharing the wealth was also a topic we touched on, if the project had continued to grow and prosper, what would everyone have done with their new found wealth?

It would have been interesting to see the children develop more ideas for the project but I am very pleased with what we did achieve. Covering economics, ecology, geography, communications, math, and group problem solving with eleven enthusiastic children has been very encouraging for a first unit. The main reason we have stopped is that most of the group went to Romeo and Juliet on Friday, so next week we begin a Shakespeare unit.

Birthday report#2

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My younger brother called to wish me a happy birthday at 7:45am. It was very nice to talk to him and especially nice that he managed to get the time difference right, a couple of times he has called at 2am in the morning! (and he is not the only one). We chatted and he gave me some feedback on the blog, which is good, because I really don’t know who is reading it. One of the motivations for starting it was the fact that all our extended family and many friends live in Australia and they don’t get letters from me, other than the Christmas epistle. So I was pleased that one of the people who doesn’t get mail from me was reading my news and views. His feedback made me laugh: less recipes, more sport! Sorry, there will be more recipes but I will also throw in some more sport if you like, especially when our softball season starts, you will be subjected to weekly reports.

I was then showered with gifts from my dear family. B6 had drawn some beautiful pictures for me. L12 and A10 had schemed together to make up a basket of goodies, some to eat, some to drink and something to listen to. My sweet husband had listened to my hints and I unwrapped “The Cosby Show” season 1, Norah Jones new cd and some more treats. Gifts from Australia had also arrived during the week, I feel very loved. I also enjoyed a birthday call from my mother-in-law and a few messages on the machine. During the morning friends dropped in with something very pretty from one of my favourite stores and again I felt blessed.

As we didn’t have to go anywhere in the morning, I set up the sewing machine and worked on a something I started in the Christmas break. It is my hope and plan to attend to the sorry state of window coverings in this house during 2007 and to do so at minimum cost. The first project is Roman blinds for my room. I am using some green cotton/linen curtains that I bought at a thrift store. Two blinds are finished except for the wooden rods and I was working on the larger, middle one this morning.

The afternoon was spent with the girls at a rehearsal while the boys went from store to store looking for Xcountry ski boots. We have just finished some delicious Chinese take out and are going to pile onto my bed to watch an episode from the Cosby Show. So thank you to my children and husband for your thoughtfulness and love for me today and everyday. Thank you to my family and friends near and far who thought of me today or any other day. Thank you, Lord for your faithfulness which is new every morning of every single day.

More Perfect than the Moon

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Recently I realized that my son has not heard many of the novels I read to the two girls when they were his age and a little older. So we are revisiting them. One which we enjoyed years ago was Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan. There are now four books about Sarah and her family: Sarah, Plain and Tall, Skylark, Caleb’s Story and More Perfect Than the Moon.

The library has them all on cd, read by Glenn Close, who plays Sarah in the movie versions of Sarah, Plain and Tall and Skylark. Each book tells the story of the family Sarah marries into, but from the perspective of a different family member. When Sarah joins the Witting family she becomes the stepmother to Anna and Caleb. Anna writes about all the family’s experiences in her journal and before moving to town urges Caleb to do the same.

More Perfect than the Moon is told by Cassie the youngest child and her approach is a little different to Anna’s and Caleb’s. She has been told to write about what she sees and about what is going on. In order to do that she lurks and spies and listens in on other people’s conversations. Her behaviour does not go unnoticed however and her family members reprimand her.

Cassie decides that it is just as valid to create her own stories of what is going on. The characters are her family, but the plot is definitely her own. Her stories are very amusing and had all of us laughing and repeating lines to each other. Her desire to create fantastic tales about her family is borne out of fears that Sarah’s pregnancy will end in tragedy. Her journal entries contain promises of happiness and gifts “more perfect than the moon”.
The story is somewhat predictable but this did not spoil it for us. Cassie does find something “more perfect than the moon” but it was not what she had expected. We did feel that Patricia MacLachlan might not be finished telling the tale of Sarah and the Witting family, so we will be looking out for a new journal keeper’s story.

Birthday report#1

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ski We all lay in our beds and called out “Happy Birthday,” to Andrew on Saturday morning as he left to go skiing in Gatineau Park. He left around 7:30am so there was no gift giving or celebrating before he left. By the time he returned we were all at violin group classes for the day. He dropped in to pick up B6(not a violinist) so they could go to the church and make a car for the upcoming Awana car races. Each participant starts with a block of wood, an axel and some wheels and they design and decorate their cars for racing. Last year both B6 and A10 brought home trophies for speed, so B6 is pretty keen to retain his title.

After group class we met back at home for supper with friends. The cake had to be iced, but I couldn’t make chocolate icing as B6 had requested (even though it wasn’t his birthday) because it appears that cocoa is a bit of an exotic food item. I searched the baking shelves but could not find any, only chocolate cake mix, chocolate muffin mix, chocolate pudding mix and premade chocolate icing, no cocoa for those of us who want to make it from scratch. So, we had coffee icing instead, which no-one seemed to mind, as our children seem to be very fond of coffee even though they are not allowed to drink it. As it turns out I should have been buying icing sugar as there was only enough at home to make icing to put between the layers not on top.

Before we ate there was a little gift giving, Andrew opened one gift, then we all listened to the next gift. L12 and A10 had composed a piece of music for two violins and then recorded it. The birthday boy was very pleased and we were all most impressed with the piece. Also on the recording was an instrumental version of the Happy Birthday song and two vocal versions: one sensible, one silly!

We enjoyed our Pork Vindaloo and then Andrew and I raced off before the birthday cake as we were going out to see one of our friends appear in “Little Shop of Horrors The show was excellent, as was our talented friend who played Chiffon, one of the Ronnettes.

Investment and risk in Ecuador

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The game seems to be getting more complicated the more money the participants make. When most people were finding it hard to make ends meet they had to decide whether they could afford to educate their children. A few are still dealing with that but most are wondering whether to hire an extra labourer to grow more crops, or how much to invest in eco-tourism. The more money there is the more choices there seem to be. When it was suggested to a few farmers that they might not need to plant two hectares as they already had enough money to cover their needs, they were surprised and said they hadn’t thought of that.

The eco-tourism project has proved to be equally or more profitable than farming for those employed by it. The village members met with the eco-tourism specialists to decide how the profits should be divided. The eco-tourism team had come up with three proposals, inspired partly by the photos they saw last week of the real eco-tourism resort. There was not unanimous support for the development of the eco-tourism project this time and the reasons were varied. Someone suggested that too many tourist would result in too much “civilisation” coming to the village. Others, the struggling farmers, wanted to see some of the profit divided among the village members not all re-invested in making the project bigger and better. They saw the proposal to pour all the profit plus some further investment as too risky and voted accordingly. The vote was carried, however, and now the eco-tourism specialists are soliciting applications for boat drivers, tourist cabin builders and a boardwalk builder.

One of the struggling farmers commented to me that if most of the village were no longer farming, but employed by the eco-tourism project, the price of coffee, maize and cacao might rise. She is not applying for any of the jobs.