This time of year, all the teachers like to keep us hopping with concerts and year-end extravaganzas. Today Rose had her 3rd grade music concert at school. Where Daddy is her teacher. Here are some photos of the whole Discovery Elementary 3rd grade gang and George (and Mrs. Wirth, too)...Can you spot Rose in the photos?
This is Rose's class, Mrs. Johnson's, doing their "Thunderstorm" piece, composed by the kids and directed by George. 
He's using his Uncle Peter's sax, which we've moved around with us three or four times now over the years. Good to see it's going to be used. Elijah will probably really get into this for a while, let George teach him some and learn a bunch on his own, then move on to other things eventually. That's okay. Kids naturally learn in fits and starts, leaps and bounds. We won't make him practice the same old music for 1/2 an hour a day, I'll tell you that! He already sounds great, played a mean "Hot Cross Buns" right off the bat, and is now working on other things. Loud and soft. High and low. You get the picture.
Next up on the music front is Rose's piano recital on Sunday, Elijah's orchestra concert on Tuesday and George has several concerts to conduct and a studio recital to host over the next week which means he'll be out of the house a bunch. Why do they save it all till May? I think some of this should be done in April, just like Christmas parties are now often in January. Anyone else agree?
On another note (pun intended), below is a photo of the best 50 cents I've spent in a long time. Map placemats! Since I got these at a homeschool book sale last week, we've already had countless geography conversations over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Where's Myanmar? What part of China had the earthquake? What's the capital city of Missouri? And so on. If it's in the news, we can talk about it. And they love to quiz me on the capitals and stuff. Little do they know they're learning it as they do. And no, I'm definitly not smarter than a 5th grader. (At least not my 5th grader.)
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