COMPONENT: A STROKE OF GENIUS
TOPIC: RENAISSANCE MEN
A Visit from Leonardo da Vinci
We saw Leonardo da Vinci, California style--shorts and sandals. He came to the opening day of our Renaissance component--Renaissance Men. The topics include: Leonardo--the artist; Palestrina--the musician; and the point in time--Gutenberg inventing the printing press.
He was a great Leonardo. (I put the costume together, except the beard, and hardly recognized it, since that black, velvet cloak falls to just above my ankles!
The kids dissected worms, drew body parts and learned about anatomy, danced a Renaissance dance, and did this printing activity. We also had a get-to-know you game that was enlightening.
Our Latin class was the next day--on Halloween, so Giselle and Bradley dressed up. I provided the traditional--this is our third year--root beer made with dry ice. I made way too much and had to throw so much out, because Giselle didn't drink it! (Oh, and I see some boiled peanuts on the table as well!)
San Diego Science Center
Before our trip to Utah we went on a field trip to San Diego. Our school group was headed to the Fleet Science Center, since we were learning about Leonardo da Vinci. This place is nostalgic for Giselle since we had passes to this place during Knights of the Periodic Table school year.
I knew this wouldn't be an overly intellectual field trip for Giselle, but she wanted to go, so we did.
After the science center, we walked to the arboretum to eat lunch.
Here's the view from the arboretum:
Lastly we headed to the beach and stayed there until dusk. Giselle and I drove with another family, and it was so fun to visit with them and everyone there.
Amanda, with her youngest boy:
This was a pretty day. I'm so thankful for digital cameras, which help me remember some of the wonderful things we experience in life.
October Field Trip to Utah
I took a group of students in my van for a big field trip in Utah. The purpose was to see the musical, The Scarlet Pimpernel, but we fit lots of other things in as well, including an opera and two museum visits.
Before seeing the opera, Il Travatore, I had the students:
Read a synopsis of the opera, learn more about opera by listening to four Giuseppe Verdi Classics for Kids podcasts, listen to The Anvil or Gypsy Chorus, and I also shared a modern version of the Anvil Chorus, as played by the Glen Miller Band on youtube.
We had super seats, but after the opera was over we moved up to the very front of the theater for an informal question and answer session. We learned about how the leads and the operas are chosen. The man mentioned that Enrico Caruso—the really famous tenor my mother used to listen to on her records—said that you only needed one thing to perform the opera Il Trovatore--the four greatest singers in the world! It sounded like it. The director told us that most other operas only needed one or two really strong leads, and that is why the opera, Il Tovatore, is more difficult to perform. The entire question and answer session was fantastic and made us appreciate what we had just experienced even more.
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| We stayed at Brittany's home and she came with us to all our Utah destinations. |
Tuesday morning we drove to Provo to see the Crandall printing museum, in conjunction with our study this year of Gutenberg. (We visited this museum a few years ago, but it's always good to do some review!)
This museum has the only movable Gutenberg type in the world. The International Print Museum in So. Cal. got their Bible page type from this museum—but it is one huge piece, not individual pieces, like this museum has. We watched them make an actual piece of type and did all the usual printing stuff.
The next room was about The Declaration of Independence and winning the Revolutionary War with words, such as the printing of The Crisis, by Thomas Paine. The next room had a Grandin printing press—the one used to print the Book of Mormon. Giselle and I had just been to the Grandin printing store in New York a few weeks beforehand, so everything just cemented what we had learned. There were two other press machines in this room—a LINOTYPE and a MONOTYPE.
The owner of this museum, Mr. Crandall, told us how he worked in a print shop from the time he was 14. His job was to put all the tiny, individual type back in the alphabetized cases—ugh! He showed us an huge mess of scattered type in a tray (I have a photo). His sleeve got caught on a page of type from the Book of Mormon press, and an entire page just lifted out of the press 3 days before his museum opened! Huge disaster.
Mr. Crandall took us up to his apartment over the museum—he has an office and then a secret passageway bookcase leading to his small quarters. He loved showing the kids this.
After the museum we picked up pizza and drove to Amber's home in Spanish Fork for lunch. It was fun to visit with her and the kids and just relax.
On the way back to Provo and SLC we drove by the Hindu Lotus temple. I was just going to drive by, but some kids wanted to go inside, so we stopped for five minutes. You can see it was a perfect day.
The lines, "I am my own Shostakovich" and "I am my own Picasso" are from our school year song:
Wednesday morning we went to the Leonardo museum in Salt Lake City. There was a special exhibit which included models of Da Vinci's machines, etc., which enhanced the visit to the museum. We stayed for 3 ½ hours, which was about 5 hours too short! We all got audio guides for the exhibit which was over the top too! This is not what I’ve seen in the past. There was an entire, gargantuan display all about the Mona Lisa.
We drove back up to Brittany's home in Riverston to change, and then on north of SLC to a community theater in Centerville. This musical was fabulous! This was the reason we drove all the way to Utah. Even though all the actors are volunteers, they were exceptional, and the play exceeded my expectations.
We could tell the difference in voice quality and height of experience between the opera and a musical, but we enjoyed them for their own merit. It was hard to compare a serious opera tragedy to a very light-hearted musical. We laughed and laughed at the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the three youngest girls especially enjoyed the musical.
For three hours Wednesday—from the time we left SLC on the drive home, they sang all the songs from the musical. I played the CD of all the songs and pumped the music back to them after the first little bit, and I also had printed and put into a binder all the lyrics. THEY LOVED IT! By the time 3 hours was over I was ready for quiet. I decided to wait until they got through all the songs again before I told them I was ready for silence. But they were finished by then too, as they had no voices left! They were pretty funny. I asked Giselle to take photos of them singing. I’m glad we saw the opera first, otherwise they may have been bored. It was good to end our last night with the Pimpernel.
Chauvelin reminded both Giselle and me of Javert from Les Mis—his song could be interchanged with Javert’s song.
Two of Giselle’s friends came with us on different nights to the opera and the musical. They are roommates at BYU.
Before we left Brittany's home the next morning, I took some photos of things she has been doing for school--we're doing the same theme, but live in different states!
This Mona Lisa frame was part of Brittany's opening day of school:
You can see Giselle on the escalator, putting her hand near this 'thing' which moved when it detected motion.
We went into the exhibit first. Later I only went upstairs to the rest of the museum and to take photos of the kids, but I got hooked and didn’t get to see the rest of the exhibit downstairs. I didn’t even see half the museum. We all had too much fun making stop-action movies! That was fun!
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| Here is Giselle "painting" a picture using a computer program. |
While I sat making a Leonardo movie I realized that we had had our key points in the exhibit, then did our inquiries upstairs in the museum, which was perfect.
We left SLC that afternoon and arrived in Victorville late that night.
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| Singing for three hours as we drove through Utah. |
The kids were all great. When a few were a little noisy, I told them to keep it down and that was the last of it. They all laughed and visited on the way home. They were pretty tired though, and after stopping at Mesquite for dinner, most of them slept the rest of the way. At least they were all really quiet. I didn’t dare stop after that because I didn’t want them to wake up! I listened to books on tape and ate sunflower seeds all the way home. It was a memorable and culturally fulfilling three days.
MOVIE: This is the longest stop-action movie that I made. There were stations at the museum to make flat or 3D movies. The camera was already set up stationary and connected to a computer screen. I only had to move the pieces around on a background. It still took probably 15 minutes or more to make this 33 second movie:
Our ward's Young Women in Excellence is usually held in November too. These are the things Giselle chose to share this year: Her Latin book, an invitation to her own piano students' upcoming recital, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, (a book she read for school), a Grieg piano piece she performed, the chainmaille she made for her Joan of Arc costume, and the children's book she wrote and illustrated:
Last year Giselle and I missed the annual Handel's Messiah Sing-In in Riverside, but went to one in Utah instead. This year we attended the Riverside one and drove up to Utah the next day.
On our way out of Riverside we drove around the Mission Inn to see the Christmas lights.
We met other families there, and we exchanged Christmas ornaments, as we did the year before at our medieval Christmas faire.
One new thing I did was bring in a few branches for our school-themed ornaments from last year and this year. You can see Mozart's silhouette on the left and Newton's apple on the right, from this school year's ornament exchange, which happened at the Messiah Sing-in.
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