Homeschool day 48 of 180
Government school day 38 of 170
Kelly and Christian are doing a music/science program this year called Lyrical Life Science that is turning into one of the big highlights of the year. How we got to this will require some explaining. I wrote last year about a little program that we started, not so much because I thought it was going to be any good, but because it was part of Christian’s fourth grade program from his Sonlight curriculum. That program was called Wee Sing America. It consisted of a little book and a CD that contained a whole bunch of traditional and patriotic songs and famous quotations. There was one song assigned by Sonlight for each week of the school year. I set aside a little time each day for the kids to memorize and sing the songs together. It was a wildly successful program. They sang one of the songs together at our local library’s talent show and won second place. They still sing the songs all the time, usually while we are travelling in the car, but at other times, too.
I wanted to do something similar this year, but most of the Wee Sing materials were for younger kids. As I was putting together my purchase list in the summer, I noticed a program called Lyrical Life Science from a little company called Lyrical Learning. Sonlight offered it as an optional item to go with their normal, very good, fifth grade science program that deals with the human body. Sonlight did not use a song for every week, but one every two or three weeks when there was matching material in the other part of the program. When I looked up the Lyrical Learning on the web, I saw there were three Lyrical Learning volumes available for the life sciences. That was more than enough songs for one per week, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger and bought all three volumes. We started out doing one song per week.
The idea was for the kids to memorize one song per week. There is a wonderful workbook and CD (with the music) that goes along with the song/text book, so we had the kids work through the materials in the workbook during each week as they worked on the songs. As we have been going along, I have noticed that the kids were really picking up and remembering the science they were getting in the program. I also noticed that the songs were hilarious in a very intellectual, but campy sort of way. Last night we had a talk about how the program is going. It started when I listened to the kids sing the hilarious and very, very interesting song about viruses to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”.
I noticed that, while the song was interesting and fun, but too long to memorize in one week. Christian and Kelly know most of the tunes quite well because they sang them last year in their Wee Sing America program. We are almost at the end of Volume 1 of the series with only one more week to go before it is finished. It is kind of a lousy deal, though, if you have a really cool song to sing, but cannot remember all the words because you have had to go on to learn another equally cool song. The right thing to have done would have been to have given them two weeks per song. That would give enough time to memorize the songs, but not so much time the songs do not stay fresh.
Our plan going forward is to go back through volume one a week at a time so the kids can get those songs memorized well enough to sing them in the car without having the book with them. Then, starting with Volume 2-Mammals, Ecology, and Biomes, we will give each song two weeks. We should finish Volume I and two thirds of Volume 2 this year. That will leave us the rest of Volume 2, Volume 3-The Human Body, and, if we get that far, Lyrical Earth Science Volume 1-Geology.
The funny deal is that after we bought the books, we noticed that the author is from Corvallis, the next town over from where we live and the town where I work.