Sneaking in Learning While Visions of Sugar Plums Dance in Their Heads
We have not gone on vacation yet let me assure you! While I will admit keeping their attention is getting tougher by the day, we are finding creative ways to sneak in academics and plan on working as long as we can. This week we have been making our final preparations for our Holiday Concert, which is TONIGHT by the way at 7:00 in our gym. In keeping with the musical theme that has created for our school, I planned a few lessons to analyze some familiar Christmas song lyrics, create new lyrics to old tunes, and compare and contrast different forms of media.
We began our week by examining the traditional tune, “The 12 Days of Christmas.” As a class we researched what each of the gifts were and how much it would cost to give those gifts this year. The total for this year is over $25,000 for gifts that we all agreed none of us would want! To give this old tune a modern spin, we worked together to create a list of gifts that we not only wanted to see under our trees (OK, so some are a bit big for under the tree) but also fit into the melody of the song. We had to alter some of our gifts because they had too many syllables to fit into the melody 🙁 . Here is our list:
Day 1- a new bike
Day 2- 2 barbie dolls
Day 3- 3 tickets to the concert or game of our choice
Day 4- 4 computers
Day 5- 5 necklaces
Day 6- 6 Lamborghinis (nice right?!)
Day 7- 7 iPad minis
Day 8- 8 little puppies (say awe- you know you want to)
Day 9- 9 razor scooters
Day 10- 10 little hedgehogs
Day 11- 11 motorcycles
Day 12- 12 Apple iPhones
I will now give you a few minutes to sing through the lyrics because you know you want to check to see how well we stayed true to the original melody. Not too bad, huh?!
Once we wrapped up our dream wish list, I threw a monkey wrench at them. They had to research the cost of one of each of these items, round it to the highest place value available to them, multiply it by the number of days the item fell on (ex. 2 barbie dolls would mean 2 times the cost), and then add up the total of all the items. How’s that for some learning? Santa definitely had to shell out some more cash for our list. Our grand total for all items was $1,861,340.00!
So for our next Holiday hit, we took a good long look at “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One of my kids favorite holiday stories is, Olive, the Other Reindeer. How appropriate that we discuss flubbed lyrics the day of the concert, right?! Admit it, you have all rocked out to a song only to have someone inform you that what you are singing and what the lyrics actually should be are not quite matching up. We studied the book and the poem and compared and contrasted the stories of Olive and Rudolf. Once done we took it one step further and compared the book version of Olive to the movie of Olive. The discussions were lively and very interesting. Great points were made by all. In addition to our lesson on lyrics and comparing and contrasting using Venn diagrams, we also snuck in some character education about teasing others. Not too shabby for pre-break learning!