Day 31 / 101 - The Nutcracker

Over the weekend my daughter was fortunate enough to star in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Nutcracker, which performed five shows at Cleveland's PlayhouseSquare.  Early in November she auditioned for a mouse role, and luckily enough, made the cut.  The past five weeks have been full of rehearsals, and more rehearsals, and even more rehearsals.  Once again, I felt so fortunate to be a homeschooler, because we were able to fit these into our school day with very little stress added to our family. Her cast performed in three of the five shows with the dance company.  She loved every minute of it. 

Because we have been immersed in a Nutcracker world, I took the opportunity to add in some Nutcracker themed learning activities.  Here are a few:
- We researched Peter Tchaikovsky.
- We researched the Ural Mountains (in Russia) where Tchaikovsky was born.
- We listened to and studied the music.  I'm impressed how well we know the score after five weeks.
- We studied where the nutcracker wooden dolls came from and how they got their name.
- We added in Nutcracker based assignments for all our Language Arts work (i.e. list 25 adjectives that describe the mice, the orchestra, etc.)
- We read countless Nutcracker books in order to really familiarize ourselves with the story line.

My daughter did an excellent job performing, but my post wouldn't be complete if I didn't praise my son.  He has very graciously allowed his sister to have the spotlight and all of the attention for the past several weeks.  And, I didn't hear a single complaint as he sat through the 2 hour ballet more than once!