Visits to the Opera!

In the past 2 months, the girls and I have attended two operas (the boys weren’t interested…). I organized these trips to the opera for our local homeschool group after being contacted by one of the organizers for the San Antonio Opera Guild. They have been wonderful opportunities to learn about and experience an opera for a wonderful price…FREE!

The first opera we saw was all in English. It was the Mikado presented at the Lila Cockerell Theatre in downtown San Antonio. Today we saw Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte at the Buena Vista Theatre on the downtown campus of UTSA. This second theatre was much smaller and they gave an interesting rendition of this opera… Their presentation was mostly in English but had some parts in Italian. They did have a small screen the showed what they were saying/singing throughout..which was helpful!

We were not able to take pictures of the opera itself, but here are a few pictures of our first group and a few of the kids from today.

SHINE Group at the Mikado opera – we had 71 people in our group for this opera!

Mikado Opera

Mikado Opera

Mikado Opera

Mural at the UTSA Downtown Campus, just outside the Buena Vista building where we attended the Cosi Fan Tutte opera

close up!

This Side Up Christmas Concert!

Our SHINE Teen Band…This Side Up held their first Christmas Concert last night! They did wonderful! Great job everyone! They spent many hours in practice for this concert and it really showed!

Here are a few pictures of from the event (and of our family), and below are the videos of the actual concert. It is in two parts because I had to change out the batteries! These were taken on my digital camera….so they may not be the best quality (plus I had to compress them in order to post them), but they work pretty well!

Well, videos won’t upload here…please see the videos on my other blog at: www.wendyclayton.blogspot.com

Enjoy!

Crystal Snowflakes!

Last night in doing some searching for Christmas ideas, I came across this recipe for making crystal snowflakes from Borax and water.

You can find the recipe/instructions here:

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howtos/ht/boraxsnowflake.htm

So we made these this morning and they were done by just after dinner! They crystallized very quickly which is wonderful! They turned out very pretty! We did learn from trial and error that the snowflake form needs to be completely immersed into the liquid so that crystals will form on the whole thing.

Here are a couple of pictures and below is a slideshow of the whole procedure and results. We plan to make more tomorrow plus try out doing some sugar ones…which will take much longer to crystallize.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

PreTeen Girls Christmas Party Fun!

Here is a slideshow I made of our SHINE PreTeen Girls Christmas party!

The girls had a wondeful time and did very well together! A lot of fun was had by all despite our crazy weather….going from 85 degrees to about 45 during the time of the party! 🙂 (See my post here: www.wendyclayton.blogspot.com )

Make a Smilebox slideshow