Thursday night (January 11th) was the first grade musical - How Does Your Garden Grow?. All three first grade classes participated in the performance, something they have been preparing for since the first week of school, and it was absolutely fantastic! They sang six songs - Planting Seeds, We are the Loveliest Flowers, Weeds Rule! (done wrap style ... watch out pansies, weeds rule!), The Garden Hoedown (I thought for sure the risers were going to collapse during this song), How does your garden grow?, and a reprise of Garden Hoedown - each with its own choreography.
Between the songs, 15 or so first graders were given speaking parts to help tell the story of the garden. Rebecca was given the part of Herb, the gardener, who has four different speaking parts throughout the performance. She got lots of compliments for having her lines so well memorized this week for their practices and final dress rehearsal for the school Thursday afternoon.
GR and I both were very impressed with the creativity of the children's costumes (unless given a specific part, they were asked to dress as something found in the garden - flower, vegetable, weed, butterfly, etc), how well they sang their songs and recited their lines. I am really looking forward to future grade programs with this music teacher - she is wonderful!
We did record the entire performance, and we are planning to put all 25 minutes up in segments on youtube. So watch for that update tomorrow evening.
Rebecca with some of her classmates before the performance: Echo, Christopher, Dimonique, Rebecca and Gavin. Below is Rebecca talking to the audience "Hi, my name is Herb. I'm the Gardner here. The H is silent you know."
Because it was a special night we decided to go to DQ for ice cream instead of racing home to make bedtime. Everyone really enjoyed their ice cream cones, shakes, sundaes and concretes.
For those wondering what's up with Rebecca's cheek. Wednesday at the end of lunch recess, she tripped on the edge of the black top and did a face plant on the asphalt. Not only did she get that nasty scrape on her cheekbone, but she also managed to bruise the upper right portion of her lip turning it a nice shade of dark purple. Thankfully it's healing quickly and hasn't bothered her since it happened. Here's a close up of her cheek from the performance, so it's a good 30 hours or so after it happened.
Since the 15th is a holiday with no school, Sam got to celebrate his half birthday at preschool today. All week he's been talking about taking Spiderman cupcakes and this morning he helped me by dunking each cupcake in a bowl of sprinkles - red and blue for the web crawler - and then pushing a toothpick topper (I love my color printer!) in each one. He did a great job! And the cupcakes tasted soooooo yummy!
Ever-So-Moist Chocolate Cupcakes
1 chocolate cake mix (w/pudding)
1 cup lite sour cream
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
Put liners in 20-22 muffin tins. Preheat oven to 350°F.
Place cake mix, sour cream, water, oil, eggs and vanilla in a large mixing bowl. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 1 minute. Stop, scrape down sides of bowl. Increase mixer speed to medium, beat for 2 more minutes. Scrape down sides. Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full. Bake for 20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool completely. Frost with Cream Cheese Frosting.
Saturday, 23 December and Tuesday, 26 December 2006
A week or so before Christmas the children announced they wanted to go Ice Skating. That's right, Ice Skating. I'm still not sure why... I'm pretty sure it's been 10-12 years since I last went ice skating.
I told them that maybe on Saturday when we got to Grandma Mutti and Grandpa Art's house we could go ice skating. We had two choices of rinks ... the historic outdoor rink at Forest Park, or an indoor rink where my high school has held graduation for the last up-teen years. Despite beautiful weather, we opted for the indoor rink, and it worked out perfectly!
Sam went out on the ice about 10 feet and that was plenty for him, it didn't matter what we said, he wouldn't got back out. Becca went around once on Saturday, and warmed up to/was strongly encouraged to go around 3-4 times Tuesday. Emily, by the end of the second trip to the rink was starting to get the hang of gliding her feet, shifting her weight and could go a good distance without falling, or holding one of our hands. Emmy really liked ice skating and we did some looking and it turns out there are a few places she could go for lessons if she wants.
Least you think we were a show of grace and style, we have eight painful minutes of video footage from our first trip to the skating rink.
I'm sure I took more pictures than this at the rink, but I can't find them. Maybe we were using a different camera ... siblings send me pictures of this if you have them.
