Over the past two weeks (ending this past Friday), a number of our kids took swimming lessons each morning in an outdoor swimming pool. I don’t have a lot of stories about it, as Lori was the one who was driving them there, and hanging around and taking the odd picture. We haven’t done lessons for the kids in the last few years, so this was a good thing to do.
Another picture of Daelynn, doing the back-stroke:
Now for something completely different, a screenshot of my favorite world in Mine Craft Pocket Edition (with a couple of Pixlr-o-matic effects applied – specifically Harry-Wiped-Autumn) .
Around the end of May (I’ll try and pull the exact date for the next post), Danaya wrote performed her Grade 8 piano exam. This required her to choose a theme, select a number of songs around that theme, create a program, and then perform the program before a group of family, friends, and an examinator.
This is Danaya introducing one of the songs. We weren’t allowed to record the performance, but I figured a few cellphone pictures wouldn’t offend anyone. Danaya is playing the songs that she likes on our digital keyboard and we’re posting them here in the next series of posts.
So, without any further nattering-on, here is Danaya performing: Sunshowers
It’s been a busy week (and it’s only Tuesday night), and once again today it was raining. Every year I think that it must be the rainiest year for Calgary on record. Once again it seems like it, but it probably isn’t. On the plus side, my dandelion farm in the backyard is doing well, something the guinea pigs are thankful for.
The picture of Danaya and Brock was from a month or so ago, hope you enjoy it. (Brock has eyes, honest).
In this post, Heidi performs a song which she composed (with some direction from her piano teacher) called “Graceful Spider”.
The song: june-recital-heidi-graceful-spider
This is the last posting from the June piano recital. I hope you enjoyed it. I would also like to post the songs that Danaya played for her piano exam in late May; so hopefully once I convince her to record them for me, we’ll be able to share those.
A couple of weeks ago, Danaya wrote her Grade 8 piano exam. There were about 20 of us (family and friends, some both) in the audience, and an adjudicator who was grading her. She played 8 songs and I think it was a bit of a nerve-wracking experience for her. In comparison to that, I suspect that the recital performance was a breeze for her. The song being played was one of the songs she also played at her piano exam.
The song: june-recital-danaya-goldfish
Post number 3 in our “songs from the recital” series features the first of Heidi’s two numbers.
And here is the music: june-recital-Heidi-BigTeddyLittleTeddy
On Wednesday evening, while I was taking the girls and Davison to the library for our weekly visit, Lori spent some one-on-one time with Brock. Brock loves having people read books to him, and in this case Lori was reading with him through a phonics workbook (the pertinent-for-this-story portion of the page in question is photographed above).
Lori would have Brock go though a particular pattern for each word, first spelling it out, then sounding it out and saying the word, and then saying the word in a sentence. After working through the word “rid”, Brock piped up with, “Do you want me to do the ‘lid’ one now?” Lori assented, and he then spelled out L-I-D, and sounded it out. Lori also mentioned a couple of his funny sentences, ‘I sod the wood’, and ‘I went poddy’ that really cracked her up.
Here’s the next in the series of songs played at the recital, featuring Daelynn. I was planning on doing them in the order they were performed (Mikaela, Danaya, Heidi, Daelynn, Heidi), but had some technical difficulties tonight, so am straying from my clever plan.
Here’s the song: june-recital-daelynn-springrain
As mentioned in a previous post (but reiterated here if you haven’t read the “Natural User Interface” post yet), I had attempted to do an audio recording of each of the girl’s recital pieces with my cell phone. I managed to record 3 of the 5 pieces, but the microphone in my cellphone seems to be of inferior quality, and will never be mistaken for a recording studio.
So, on Sunday I had the girls play each of their recital pieces on our electronic keyboard, which is connected via a MIDI/USB cable to an old iMac, which is running an old version of GarageBand, which actually works surprisingly well. I exported the songs to iTunes, and then to a different format (.m4a), which I was then able to convert to a standard mp3 file. I’ll bet you were wondering all of the steps that I had to go through to bring you this post. Wonder no longer…
Without any further rigmarole (We just hit the chapter in “The Emerald City of Oz” tonight, where they visit the Rigmaroles”), here is another picture of Mikaela, followed by the link to the mp3 file. You should be able to doubleclick on the mp3 file and have it open in a player on your computer. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll add another step somewhere to the process.
Here’s the song “Send in the Clowns”, as performed by Mikaela Huber: Mikaela_recital_June_2012
