This week we read the book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,
the story of Phillipe Petit who walked between the twin towers.
Chloe's drawing is above and this is Hannah's. This topic was not in our original plans, but it all started with a question I asked in rehearsal. I turned to a fellow horn player and said, "We should have a horn dinner." He agreed, but we couldn't do it that night because his father was coming into town for the concert. The next day, I politely asked how his father's visit was and he said they had a watched documentaries. I love documentaries too, so we agreed we would exchange e-mails and give each other a list of recommended movies. On his list was Man on Wire. I watched it and was definitely intrigued. We had fun discussing it through messages and then I realized I thought I had seen a children's book about Petit and it had won a Caldecott medal. I looked it up and also found many people had made home school lessons for it. I wasn't super fond of the upcoming topic I had already planned so I scratched it and started this one. The kids absolutely loved the book right away and the story was so unbelievable to them, they were shocked to see the real photos.
The girls wrote a newspaper article as if they were at the event. Those first pictures were their "newspaper photos." We reviewed non-fiction and fiction
and talked about characteristics of Petit's personality. They were also fascinated that what he did was actually against the law. So is doing something amazing worth it even if it's against the law? What if he had never attempted the incredible feat for that reason? There would be no relationships with his "partners in crime," no eye-witnesses, no photos or documentary, no stories, no children's book, no home school lessons. His punishment certainly wasn't too harsh (sentenced to performing in parks for children) so it was debatable that breaking the law worked out pretty well for Petit and a whole lot of other people.
Above, the kids painted and collaged this simple art project to depict him walking in the early morning light.
Of course we had to try a bit of it ourselves.
We also charted some measurements given in the book and went outside to see the distances for ourselves.This first one, if you can see the kids that far away, is the distance between the two towers.
Yikes! In an interview I read, Petit said the walk wasn't the scary part, it was properly setting up the cables. The fact that the main cable slipped and dropped a few hundred feet meant it took his partners 3 hours just to pull it back up sounds like an ominous beginning, but it was a great lesson in not giving up when obstacles are in your way. I need to learn that lesson better for sure.
To get the wires from one tower to the other, they shot a bow and arrow. The documentary shows them practicing this in a field. In this photo, I am in Petit's position and Hannah is in the position of where the arrow landed, just on a ledge about 15 feet away and below Petit. He had to crawl to get it.
Here they're demonstrating the length of the balancing pole Petit held as he danced and reclined on the wire. Chloe is Petit this time : ) We had a great time with this lesson. I highly recommend watching Man on Wire. Know that it is not geared toward children, so I didn't watch it with the kids. We watched YouTube clips of Petit instead. The children's book also mentions that the towers are no longer there and leaves it at that. So it gives the story an accurate and poignant ending, while leaving it to the parents to explain further if they want. We did talk briefly about what happened because of course they asked what happened to the towers, but it was painful to explain to such innocent little children how terribly humans can act. I could sense how far to go with the explanation but I felt so disappointed there was even something to explain. I don't know how I will deal with future history lessons since so much of human history has been formed by evildoings.
The highlight, though, was that I had a photo of me on a visit to New York and the twin towers are in the background. They thought that was amazing.
At church the kids did some turkey hand painting.
I saw something on Pinterest about giving kids some foil and other odds and ends to sculpt with. This seemed like a great way to give the kids some "busy work." Hannah came up with this contraption.
Colin created some kind of planetary object.
As a precursor to an upcoming week on instruments, we took the kids to the UNT instrument repair shops. Ann has repaired mine and Dax's instruments several times over the years and she was so nice to host us for an afternoon.
She banged a few dents into an old trumpet bell and showed how she used the vice to roll the dents out. She showed us several tools and the chemical and degreasing baths she gives the instruments. A jazz trombone student came into the shop so the kids got to see how quickly her horn was repaired and heard her play.
Then we walked next door to see Ann's brother, Joel, who runs the string repair shop. He showed us the inside of a bass he was working on, we saw a buffer machine, and he made each kid a tail of horse hair he uses for bows. They thought that was pretty cool.
Ann also took us to the piano repair shop where Hannah was interested in the inner workings and we saw how thick the low note strings are. Finally we quickly saw the reed making room where a bassoonist showed the kids her reed in progress. It was a great trip and the kids had some great questions, most of which were understandably, "what's that??"
This week and it's looking like next, we're reading a book called Cranberry Thanksgiving. It sounds pretty ho-hum but it's actually quite a funny tale and opens up lots of learning opportunities. The kids especially love the artwork and one page makes me laugh every time I see it. So the explanation for Chloe's face above is that they were very excited to try cranberries! I said I'd only eaten them dried, cooked, and in juice, but they could try a raw one. You can see it went over really well. Haha. She made this face for 5 solid minutes and at each meal has requested I do NOT put cranberries on her plate! At first I felt a little bad she was so excited and then disappointed in the taste, but that was actually more of an experience to remember, right? : )
I'm trying to give the kids more time to explore rather than have every moment dictated. Being homeschooled comes with the stigma of not being independent sometimes, and although these kids are certainly independent when it comes to certain things, they rely far too much on me to give instructions for every moment of their day. I'm constantly pushing them to work without waiting for me to answer questions to think out problems on their own. It's a long road ahead, but more activities like this will help- along with my being consistent. I'm finding I expect a little too much on the front end and could stand to give more thorough explanations in general, which would likely result in less needy questions as they do the work. It's a learning process. Anyway, I gave them a tray of tools and they spent awhile doing whatever they liked to explore the cranberries. They discovered they floated! They discovered the seeds on the inside and that when boiled, they give off a red dye.
They wrote down adjectives to describe the berries as they played. We watched a couple of videos about cranberry bogs, and they were surprisingly beautifully done. I've seen the bogs on Ocean Spray commercials like everyone else, but the whole process is so neat to watch. One of the videos had some pretty background music and the kids literally oohed and aahed over the helicopter sweeps of the floating cranberries. Hannah thought it kind of sad they were picked at all.
They returned to foil activities by each "designing" a boat to hold cranberries. They got so excited about this one, they all wanted to get in with the cranberries. Old me would have been a spoil-sport as I am with way too many things, but I'm trying to improve so I said "sure," as long as they actually cleaned themselves in the process : )
We're hoping to make cranberry bread tomorrow and to move on to the more historical aspects of Thanksgiving.
