Homeschooling at Disney - Planning Part 1 - Disney Youth Education Program

Last February we went to Disney and the kids did a class while we were there.  We had a great time and decided to do it again this February.  We get a lot of questions about how we planned our trip.  Here is the first of a series of posts about how we plan for school-cation at Disney.

Home School Families Can Go To Disney When It's NOT Crowded!

First we decided to go during a time of the year that isn't busy.  Flexibility is our favorite part of homeschooling!  September and early February were the logical choices.  (This also means lower rates on accommodations)!

Disney Youth Education Program

Next we checked out what classes were available for the kids to take.  Disney is strict on having the kids in the class is that for their age.  Our travel dates were set around when the class we wanted was offered.

Here are the links to find the classes:
Disney Youth Education Series (YES)
Choose the park you want (Florida or California)
Make sure you have chosen the individual enrollment option.
This page will show you a list of the classes and a description of each

If you are taking a class you book your whole trip through the YES program site.  You can click here to go straight to the purchase tickets page.  This page doesn't have the descriptions for each class.  It is cheaper for the whole family to get tickets, even those not taking class, to buy through this option than a travel agent.  To see how much it would cost your family choose a class and go through the site.

We began planning in the Fall for our trip.  We booked the class as soon as it became available so we could go ahead and plan the rest of the trip.

Synergy in Science; Last Years Disney Class

Last year the girls took the Synergy in Science class at Epcot.  It was awesome.  The class started before the park opened, so we got in early.  In the class we learned about how it takes many parts working together to make a ride work.  We learned about how Spaceship Earth was made on the outside, and how the adio-anamatronics were made on the inside.  We got to bypass the line and go on the ride as a part of the class.  In our Classical Conversations curriculum we go through a timeline from the beginning of time to present day.  Spaceship Earth is the timeline in a ride!  Classical Conversations is also big on History and Geography so Epcot was an amazing school day.

This year we are taking the How Things Move class in the Magic Kingdom.  One parent is allowed to take the class with the kids.  My husband is taking it with our daughters this year while our son and I enjoy the park together (he is too little for class).  We will update on how awesome this class is after the trip.


Now that you have the links to find the YES program you can figure out the first piece to budgeting a school-cation to Disney.  The next part is accommodations and food.  I will post the choices we made for those in my next post.

I Recommend

I have always loved Jumpstart Music.  I used the game some when I taught public school a little bit and my own kids have enjoyed it a lot.  It is a preschool/elementary school game computer game that works on musical concepts.  You can adjust the level.  You go through music land and complete rhythm, melody, and instrument identification games to collect points.  I highly recommend it for anyone learning basic musical grammar!

       Play back the correct rhythmFind the bad notesPlay back the correct melody

All Play - Improvisation

Deedle, deedle, dumpling,
My son John
Went to bed
With his blue jeans on--
One shoe off
And one shoe on--
Deedle, deedle, dumpling,
My son John.

Change one line - went to bed with his/her __________.  

Post your improvised line in the comments!

Here's mine

Deedle, deedle, dumpling,
My son John
Went to bed
With his light saber on--
One shoe off
And one shoe on--
Deedle, deedle, dumpling,
My son John.

What's Heard Can't Be Unheard

I had another fun morning teaching music classes this week.  I told one class I wish I could bottle up the amazing musical developments I get to see the kids make in class and share it with the whole world.

We used this version of Lukey's Boat for a play along.

In a Music Together class the lullaby follows the instrument play along.  This particular play along song is fun and upbeat and it can take your body a little bit to make a big switch from Lukey's Boat to Brahms Lullaby.  I enjoyed watching one little girl continue to internalize the beat from Lukey's Boat well into the lullaby, then change gears and sing Brahms Lullaby while still enjoying to spin in the middle of the group.

Another child in one of my classes likes the Music Together recording of Brahms Lullaby.  It has a bell sound at the beginning.  If you know this lullaby, simply reading the name of it may make your brain think of the tune.  But as soon as we begin to sing the song the little by mentioned knows he would like to hear the version on the recording instead.  If he had never heard the recording he wouldn't know any different.  The point being that once we are exposed to something we can never be unexposed to it.  We might forget, but chances are when we hear it again we will quickly remember.  I can enjoy Brahms Lullaby in different ways, but I can't disassociate the music with the title now that I've heard it and know what it is.

If the title doesn't prompt your memory you can listen here.
 As a mom, and a teacher, I think this power is amazing and scary at the same time.  It makes me realize that I really have to watch what I expose my children to.  Once they hear it it can't be unheard.  They can make decisions about how to approach it, but it can't be unheard.  I want to fill their heads with good!

The Classical Conversations curriculum we use for homeschooling puts many of the facts the children need to learn to music.  I am continually amazed at how they can recall a whole history facts with names and dates by me singing a few simple notes to prompt them.

 This is not one of my kids, but she is a perfect example of how singing helps memorization and what kids are capable of.  Start singing all sorts of wonderful things with your kids while they are little.  Chances are they will soak it all up and amaze you!
 

If you want to see how more about the power of music and memory go to YouTube and search "music therapy nursing home" and see how elderly people remember and react to familiar music.

Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Week 14

In the Foundations program in Classical Conversations the students get small piece of information to memorize for each subject each week.  They are really only required to memorize the work at a young age.  As they get older they will need to begin to understand the material and use it.  However, we like to add a worksheet, game, or video as necessary.  Sometimes the extra information is more for me than for the kids!

English Grammar

Memory work: Conjugate to break - to break, break, breaks, broke breaking, broken

We haven't tried a worksheet for English grammar yet this year, but I found some good ones.

Free worksheet - conjugating to break. http://www.k12reader.com/worksheet/verb-conjugations-to-break/

Science

Memory work - What is an element?  An element is a basic chemical substance defined by its atomic number (number of protons) and atomic mass.

Some fun videos to go along with this week and upcoming science memory work.

Geography

Memory Work - Northwest Mountains, Cascade Mountains, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. McKinley

Mt. Rainier coloring page.
http://www.usa-printables.com/Places/Parks-Monuments/01-parks-013.htm

History

Memory work - Tell me about tycoons.  Curing the late 1800's tycoons like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Swift fueled the nation's Industrial Age by developing American resources.

We've visited the Biltmore house, but now I understand who owned it better!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller

Biogrophy video on Andrew Carnegie

Latin

Memory Work - John 1:2 hoc erat in principip apud Deum.  This was with God in the beginning.

Math

Memory Work - Linear Equivalents 2.54 cm = 1 inch, 12 inches = 1 foot, 5280feet = 1 mile

There is a fun song we will sing this to in class!  My three year old has had his tape measure out all week.  You can buy an inexpensive little tape measure for your kids at Lowes and measure everything this week!

Science Experiment

Art Project

and

Presentations

Rockwell - See previous post for a description on this weeks art project and presentation promp

Wouldn't the World Be A Better Place If...

when one person started clapping others joined in and created something beautiful.

I love that my job is to cultivate this kind of creativity!

What We've Been Up To At Journey Montessori

I love teaching for Journey Montessori and it's because of the atmosphere that Director Laura Self has built for the school.  The kids who attend school there are truly fun to teach.  If you have met me before you know I never really grew up and I like to teach through playing.  The rule when the kids get an instrument in their hands is to try it out first.  Who wants to get an instrument and hold it still?  We play, make some crazy noise, and then focus that into a purposeful beat and change it into making some music!

During the first semester we work on keeping a steady beat (but I never really tell the kids that, to them I think we are just playing with music).  We do not put rhythm patterns in our hands or feet, only steady beats on eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, whole notes.  This is the same way we learn in Music Together.  We will never put the rhythm of a song in our bodies in Music Together class.  Keeping the beat in your bodies and the rhythm in your voice is essential in basic rhythmic development.  

By the second semester we begin to move into putting rhythms in our hands and feet as well as our voices.  Some children will still need to work on keeping a steady beat in their bodies too.  This is an area you can help them with at home.  Play your favorite music and find as many ways you can think of to keep a beat to it (clap, pat, stomp, play on pots and pans).  In class we are beginning by simply clapping the syllables of our names in time in a song.  Not all of us have the same number of syllables in our names, but in the song we are using we need to fit each name into the same amount of space.  Again, an easy activity to play with at home as well.  

First semester we worked on identifying different voices; singing, speaking, whispering, shouting, and how to get a good singing voice out.  Because it was the Star Spangled Banners 200th birthday we learned to sing it and what the words mean.  This is not a typical song to expect small children to sing.  The vocal range needed is not what little voices are expected to sing, but the kids were so excited to learn it and sing it!   We used this book by Scholastic to study the song.  You can find it on Amazon.

We also accomplished singing the African Noelle in two parts at the same time in December.  You can find a lot of versions of that song on Amazon too.  I was so proud of the kids for being able to hold their own simple part!

This semester we will build on those amazing tonal accomplishments as well as take a look at instruments and what families they belong to.  Up until now we have only looked at non-pitched percussion instruments (sticks, shakers, wood block, etc.).  This semester we will explore the ones that make different pitches, like our voices do.  We will use the book Zin Zin A Violin and The Carnival of the Animals for this quest. 

Music Together - Beginning of the Winter Session

I was excited to see both familiar faces and new families this week in my Music Together classes.  I am blessed to have involved and loving adults in all of my classes.  There are times when it can takes weeks to convince adults in a class to participate.  It can be especially hard to participate when you have a toddler who just wants to enjoy toddling, or a baby who is too little to stand and dance on their own.  Thank you to everyone for singing, playing, and dancing no matter what stage your child is in!  Children reap the benefits of class when they see the adults they love enjoying the activities themselves.  

Music Together has nine collections of music.  This nine week session we are using the Bells collection of songs.  The nine collections of music are designed to take you and your child through three full years of Music Together classes.  I can see a lot of musical growth in children who take multiple sessions in a row.  They know the routine of class, clap to the beat with the Hello and Goodbye song (which is important because just in those two songs they now can feel both duple and triple meters), and interact quicker with other songs.  Being in a class with families who have taken classes before helps new parents and children feel the routine of class and participate.  If you are new this session this is something you can look forward to blessing other new families with in the future!

The bells collection is the first collection of song I ever taught.  I have taught it several times now and my children still love to sing the songs from this collection with me.  Now that my children are school aged we can improvise by changing parts of speech in a song (change the verb trotting to jumping, change the noun kitty cats to bugs)!  

I can't believe I started this blog 5 years ago.  It really feels like I just started it last year!  But since it is five years old I have blog entries from each of the Music Together collections hidden on here.  In 2012, the last time I taught this collection, I had just started teaching again after having our son.  If you venture back that in the blog that far you can get a small glimpse of some of the fun musical concepts we will be working on this session.  

We tiptoed and glided along with the song Hopping and Sliding and worked on feeling contrast between staccato and legato.  We will use this song to feel other musical contrasts this session!
"Children learn by noticing differences - they are especially alert to contrast.  By juxtaposing duple and triple meter as well as staccato and legato within one activity, we're giving children the opportunity to hear and experience these qualities.  For children, putting these meters and articulations into their bodies is a powerful and direct way to learn about them."

Play around with musical contrasts this week.  

Fast/Slow

High voice/Low voice

Staccato (bouncy, detached, separated)/Legato (smooth, connected)

We also explored mixed meter by enjoying the rhythmic piece Snowflakes.  It has a 5/8 time signature.  If you didn't fully embrace your inner Elsa with this piece yet hopefully you will soon!  The temperature outside this week was perfect to go along with snow, now all we need is the snow!

Norman Rockwell Lesson

Each week in Classical Conversations we have a 30 minute segment of music or art.  We are currently studying American artists.  This week we will study Norman Rockwell and attempt to create art in the same style.  

The students are going to be asked to base their artwork on a funny story.  Some tutors have requested that the students personal presentations also be a funny story to help prepare them for art.  If you just can't think of a funny story for your child to present this week use this idea!  Give them a picture and have them tell you the story about what they think is happening.  Print the picture and let them use that as a prompt for their presentation in class.  Or for older kids have them write their funny story out before class and bring that to show for presentation too!

Here are some possible prompts! 

Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Week 13

I have not added much about our homeschooling journey on this blog before so I will try to add some small pieces about what Classical Conversations is, and why we love the way we are learning in each post.  CC is divided up into three programs, Foundations, which is elementary school, Essentials, which is added in upper elementary school, and the Challenge programs, which are the middle and high school programs.  Our children are in the Foundations program so that is most of what you will hear about on this blog.  I am personally trying to learn ahead of them as much as possible so I will be ready to teach them when we get to Essentials and Challenge. 

The Foundations program is the grammar stage of learning in a Classical curriculum.  The grammar stage contains a lot of memory work.  At this age the kids brains are ready to soak up and retain a lot of information.  We want them to have a good foundation of memorized knowledge to build on.

Math

Our family always has a lot of fun in week 13 when we get to memorize liquid equivalents!  We clean off the counter and cover it with a towel, get out the measuring cups and canning jars and pour water.  This entertained my three year old for hours (which helped me get work done with the girls).  My daughters were ready to use measuring to create something bigger so we made applesauce from scratch following this recipe http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2013/10/homemade-applesauce/.  My oldest then used it as a writing activity and rewrote and illustrated the recipe on her own.

  

Science

We memorized what the atomic number means this week for science.  I admittedly didn't pay attention in chemistry growing up so please pardon any incorrect way to teach chemistry that might show up in the next few weeks.  I'd love to learn more!

As we said the memory work we enjoyed adding protons and electrons to our atoms.  My oldest then read the science card and outlined a little bit of it.

Since the science project we did at school was a little hard to see (my class did a few extra to help see the point better) we did some extra projects at home this week.  You can see them here:

My oldest must have gotten the point because when she went to double her muffin recipe this morning and she needed 1/2 cup of milk twice I said, "A half plus a half equals a whole," and she replied, "Not always!"

We had some fun with geography review by piecing together and coloring a large map of the United States.  I found the pack at Target at the end of last Summer.

We just listened, reviewed, and discussed History, Latin, English, and Timeline

All In One Place

For awhile I was great about sharing what we were doing in Music Together and at Journey Montessori on here weekly.  I was also sharing homeschooling ideas on a homeschool blog for families in our Classical Conversations group.  At some point I began to sorely neglect all things blogging.  I think it will be easier to keep up with it if I share it all in one place.

The name of the blog will stay the same because music doesn't stop when we walk out of the music classroom.  The homeschool curriculum we have chosen teaches history, science, math, timeline, English grammar, and Latin all to music.  I'm continually amazed at how quickly my children are able to memorize facts, dates, places, and translations simply by singing them.  I'm so glad we gave them a good musical foundation at an early age so they can now use their ability to sing and keep a beat to aid in learning anything.  If you have not given your child a good musical foundation to build on yet its OK!

Music is an amazing gift we are all given.  Some people are born with slightly higher musical ability, but we all have musical ability.  The ability to understand and make music can be shown on a bell curve.  This means that only a few people have an exceptionally high or low ability.  Most of us are perfectly able, we just have to be taught.  I've found the same is true with math and science, I'm not as bad as I though, I just needed to be taught properly!  You are never too old to learn the basic musical concepts of pitch and rhythm, and once you have those concepts down you can use those abilities to aid in learning so many other subjects.  My daughters are using duple meter to learn trotting in their horseback riding lessons right now.

I will tag my future posts with Music Together, Journey Montessori, or Classical Conversations.  These are the three programs I teach with/for.  Below is a brief description of each so you can read more about each program if you would like.

Music Together is an early childhood parent/child music class for children ages birth-5 and the adults who take care of them (Mommy, Daddy, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents, Nanny's, etc).  Children learn musical concepts through playing with their adults.  They are exposed to a huge variety of meters and tonalities so they can fully develop tonal and rhythmic ability.  A child can reach basic music competence (singing full songs in tune and keeping a steady beat by themselves) as early as age three, but there is no set age.  If adults have not been properly exposed to music they may still be working on reaching basic music competence, this is were I am with math!
I teach with the Music Together of Charlotte group.  I am blessed to work with such a talented group of music teachers!

Journey Montessori is an amazing preschool for three and four year old children in Charlotte.  I have been blessed to be their music teacher since they opened.  I teach one music class a week to the 20 preschool children enrolled there.  We work on basic music skills in the first semester, how to sing properly and how to keep a steady beat in our bodies and on non-pitched percussion instruments, through lots of fun songs from around the world.  In the second semester we begin more complex skills of putting rhythms in our bodies, we explore musical instruments and their families, and learn Peter and the Wolf or Carnival of the Animals songs.  The children accomplished learning how to sing a simple African song in two parts in December!

Classical Converstaions is a private Christian home-school group for children age 4 through high-school.  Students go to school one day a week and a tutor presents the material to be learned at home that week.  Elementary students also enjoy doing science experiments, art projects, playing music and review games together during their school day.  I am a tutor for the abecedarian class in the Fort Mill-Regent Park group.  Abecedarian means new learners, I have 4, 5 and 6 year old students in my class.  Having a good, set curriculum for my children and being able to go to school once a week with other amazing homeschool families is a wonderful experience for our family.  We love our classmates and my husband and I have learned so much ourselves in teaching our children!