Showing posts with label homeschool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeschool. Show all posts

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Rubber Chicken Soup











This is the true story of an unfortunate pun.

It all started several months ago when I entered a contest for the world's worst poem. I lost. Imagine, my poem wasn't even good enough to be the world's worst! How sad.

The reason I had entered, in the first place, was the glorious prize they gave you if your poem was the worst. The prize was a rubber chicken.

My son, Sage, had mentioned he wanted one. I wanted to win it for him.

Well, a week or so after the contest results came out, I saw one in the window of a pet store and decided to go in and buy it myself. (I didn't need no stinkin' contest.)

Sage loved the chicken and named it Tasty. This somehow got us talking about rubber chicken soup; and then to making an account, tastyrubberchickensoup@gmail.com.

Sage's new hobby became playing The Blue Danube on the piano while substituting the chicken squeak sounds for some notes. (Is this how Victor Borge got started?)

The other afternoon, when he had gotten a bit bored with his bassoon practice, Sage got out Tasty the rubber chicken to find out which note it makes. He compared it to the bassoon and then the piano.

Sage found that if you squeeze our chicken, it produces the note la, or a natural.

I imagine other chickens from other manufacturers produce other notes. There must be f sharp rubber chickens, and e chickens, and d chickens out there somewhere.

We definitely have a chicken. But if you squeeze most of the air out, the note then sounds half a step lower, then it's a flat chicken.

(The next time someone asks what it's like to homeschool, I think I'll just send them this article.)

Monday, September 10, 2007

The New School Year Blimp


On the first day of this year's not-school (my son of 12 stays home with me and also learns from music teachers, an art/cooking teacher, and a swimming instructor), we were watching Kiki's Delivery Service which features a blimp prominently. We looked up and saw the Goodyear blimp circling around and around our window! We took it as an omen that this would be a good school year. (We measure our unschool year from when my wife goes to teach high school.)

credits -
Photo by Langston McEachen from LSUS Archives which was supplied by mikerosebery's flickr photostream. The photo was taken in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1948.