A musical day

This morning we had a musical treat!  Our semi-local symphony orchestra (is that redundant?) had an hour-long performance for kids.  Ben (7) has always been entranced by classical music and has learned to play a finger harp (after wanting a harp for Christmas last year and receiving a smaller version) and piano.  He has recently obtained a violin from his grandpa that he would love to play.   Kevan (11) was not so interested in attending and made jokes last night about being able to sleep through the symphony in the morning if he stayed up too late.

It started with a demonstration of the different sections, having them each play the same song individually - the strings, the woodwind, the brass, and the percussion - and then all together.  This was followed by a journey through space with pictures on a screen accompanying the music.  A few classical pieces were interspersed with a few modern pieces, including the ET theme song (we just watched ET a week ago!) and the Star Trek theme song.  Some other happy tie-ins: the talk about the Roman gods the planet names come from coincided nicely with Ben's study of Roman history.   The facts about the planets that were mentioned were mostly familiar. The 1812 Overture and Tchaikovsky were familiar from our music lessons last year, and the Nutcracker performance we attended at Christmas time last year.  There was something else... I can't remember.  It is nice for them to recognize things they have learned and enabled them to catch parts of the performance that could have been over their heads.

Ben was asking me the names of the galaxies they were showing during one of the songs and I did not know.  I told him they had names, but I wasn't sure what they were and that he could find out online.  When we got home I was pleasantly surprised to see that he found that information 100% on his own on the computer.

After lunch, we went to a park day.  One of the ladies there, whom I had not met before, was knitting.  On Friday Ben had a chance to watch a lady crocheting for awhile while selling raffle tickets w/ Kevan for Boy Scouts.  She taught him how to do it and he has been practicing at home ever since.  He has also been finger knitting which I showed him how to do.  He used to beg me to teach him to crochet and knit but since I am terrible at both I never did.  Well today he watched this lady knitting, and went up to talk to her.  He asked her what she was making, and she taught him how to do what she was doing and let him knit a row.  He was absolutely entranced, and she will be hosting some folk craft workshops at her home in the next several weeks so that should be fun!  She told me he could make his own knitting needles by sanding 1/4 inch dowels so we may try that!

He is such a hands-on crafty kind of guy, and I am so not!  He (without restriction on tv and video games, gasp!) spends his spare time doing origami, drawing, tying various knots in ropes, playing with Magnetix or blocks, crocheting and finger knitting (now!), doing cartwheels...  Kevan is more like me - nose in a book or in the computer.  Or a video game.  He does a lot of creating, but it is on the computer - sprite comics, video games, video game levels or mods, etc.

That was kind of a long random tangent.  My take-home or take-to-heart for the day is to make sure to provide Ben with enough to keep him going, and to find more opportunities to experience live orchestras.  Also, I want to make sure I help Kevan find enough new challenges to keep him stretching his abilities and creativity.  He is pretty good at this on his own but I know he wants to learn a programming language to have a headstart on programming and I need to follow up on that.  I have some suggestions from acquaintances of ours who own/run a company that develops popular video games as to where he should begin so I need to make sure he has a chance to do that.