Broadening your Education

On the way to school each morning we tend to listen to Radio 2.  One of the reasons for this is that it coincides with when Chris Evans plays his 'Super 70s Smasher'; a tune (unsurprisingly) from the 1970s.  This morning it was the Rolling Stones.  A crucial part of this feature - at least as far as my kids are concerned - is the competitive element: you have to try and name the year when the song was released.  Every day we guess - after all, these songs came out before I was born, let alone the boys - and we've been keeping a tally for weeks now of how many each of us have got right.  Joel is thrilled that he has been right more times than I have...  It's always a trauma if Chris forgets to tell us the year though; I have to go home and ask Mr Google...

It got me thinking again about how important it is to teach your children things they may well never learn about in school.  I've mentioned before how Jimi Hendrix has saved our school run.  I'm disproportionately proud when Joel can name the band he's listening to...  I mean - I know it's not going to save any lives or anything - but it pleases me that he can recognise Stevie Wonder or the Jackson Five.

I'm thinking about making the boys an album of seminal tracks.  Music that all kids everywhere should grow up with as part of their DNA.  But where to begin...  I know I could make an epically long play list - but I don't want to do that.  If you were making a CD, and had maybe 15 tracks as your limit - what would you put on it?  What song is so important that you would put it on there?

Thinking back to my own childhood music recipe; I mostly remember Eric Clapton, Abba, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles and Carole King. My Dad used to pilfer guitar riffs from all over the place though when he led worship at our church. It was only relatively recently that I discovered the opening chord sequence he used for a song called 'Rejoice, Rejoice' was actually from 'Substitute'by The Who...   I suppose it was one way of broadening our musical education!

So what would be on your list?  The Beatles?  The Rolling Stones?  U2?  Mozart??? 

I may be some time...

A tale of two instruments

At the end of the last half term, Joel had to make a musical instrument.  This was homework; the instrument could be anything - but it needed to be ready for the last day of the half term, when they'd use them all for making a piece of music.  This Magnum opus was to sound like a rain storm...

We started work in plenty of time.  Joel had decided that he wanted to make a guitar.  I had found a tissue box, and the ubiquitous elastic bands.  It was all going so well...

There was nothing in the brief about making the instrument look beautiful.  But with the time available, I decided (yes reader, I brought this entirely on myself, Joel was not bothered either way) that decorating the tissue box would be a good idea.  We set to it, cutting and sticking an array of different coloured paper all over the box.  It was beautiful.  However, it had already set us on the road to disaster...

I'm quite practical - or so I like to think - especially 'for a girl'...  However, I had not foreseen the effect that the gluing would have of the structural integrity of the tissue box.  Once the box was dry, it had warped beyond all recognition.  Joel was not amused.  It looked (and more to the point, sounded) pretty rubbish - which to all intents and purposes is exactly what it was.  Our failure was only compounded by seeing one of Joel's friend's attempts at a guitar; complete with correctly shaped body, neck, frets - the whole caboodle.

There was nothing to be done; we had to make something else.

I found the mouth piece from a party blower, a cardboard tube and a plastic pot; and left Joel and his Daddy to assemble a 'clarinet'.  I was already feeling chastened by my previous attempt, and to be honest I knew that with minimal time to spare (the rain storm concert was the next day), the instrument was more likely to be structurally sound if built by the engineer in the family...  I restricted myself to cutting the desired lengths of sticky tape.

And thus Joel went to school the next morning with an instrument that he loved.  Not because it was pretty, but because it actually worked.  He later told me that there had been endless shakers, guitars, drums etc. but his had been the only wind instrument in the building...  At least I can claim to have been the brains behind the operation, and the best sticky tape dispenser in Warwickshire!