Try This at Home

Eleanore here. Hi! Here are some ideas of what to do when you have nothing else to do:

1. Create Wine Glass Harmonies. Wine glasses can be musical instruments.  A quartet, really.  Fill your wine glasses with varying amounts of water.  Get your tuner out. With your clean, wet finger, circle the rim of the wine glass until you hear a sound. On your tuner, it might not be a perfect pitch...so add or subract bits of water until the pitch is perfect. Now add more glasses to make a whole scale.  Mine was F#. What's yours?

2.  Play a game with a kid you don't know. We played tag with Juliet, a girl we did not know. She walked up to us in the park and asked, in french, if we wanted to play with her. OUI! We introduced ourselves (in french) and started in on a serious game of tag. She was only five so she didn't know tag, but she does now.

3.  Teach a class about something you know to your family. I did a class on garlic.  I'm going to do a whole series on herbs de provence.  First I learned all about the healing properties of garlic, then I made a plan to give a class about it.  My schedule was:  Draw, Guess, Learn, Test, Create. My family drew a bulb of garlic, really studying it hard because I told them they couldn't stop drawing before 10 minutes was up. Then, they guessed what garlic could heal.  Then, they listened to me read about garlic's history and what sicknesses it can be used for.  And then I gave them a test to work on in "class." And then they took one of the remedy "recipes" and followed it, actually creating a remedy.

4.  Drink sheep's milk.  Frances says, "We got our sheep's milk from a tired man at the market.  I had to use the bottle that we brought from our house and he took the bottle and poured it from a big container of sheep's milk. It's the most luscious thing ever in your lives. I wish I could just drink a whole gallon of it every day."

5.  Take a class in another language.  We went to an art class with no English speakers and did pointillism with tempera paints.  It was so hard to know what the teacher was saying. And she wasn't painting an example. So, I had to look at the people around me to see what they were doing.  At the end of the class, one six-year-old came up to me, took my hand and said, "la fleur," and pointed to a flower. Then said, "la table" and pointed to a table.  Frances says, "At the end of the class three girls came up to me and said, "Halllooo."  I was making a cootie catcher and so they asked, 'qu'est ce c'est?' and so I showed them how to play it. One of those kids said to her three other friends, 'you should come and look at this."  I knew this was what she said because she also waved them over and they came over.  And then I showed them, too.  I am going to make cootie catchers for all of them next week."

See you tomorrow!
Eleanore