Yep! We did it again! We wrapped up another Sound Waves summer camp session and had a great kickoff to the new school year.
Here is the message I sent to parents after session 1:
"Thanks for sending your kid(s) to camp this week! I felt so much great energy from these kids. We did the coolest science today! I heard kids saying it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen. I admit I was pretty floored myself. We refracted light with a telescope mirror so that we could see things that were otherwise invisible, like heat, cold, breath, handclaps, butane vapors... it was awesome! If I can figure out super slow-mo photography I'll be able to catch sound wave vibrations but as it was we were pretty astounded. Kids acted like we had discovered light for the first time. We worked hard on the setup. It was very very hard to do as the angles and focal lengths and the precision has to be perfect for it to work. It was also very hard not to bump the table because it was so precise that the SLIGHTEST change to angles really messed it up. I had Kurt Glaser, a sound engineer coming who promised to help if I got stuck, but I got up at 5:30 to do all my housework so I could try to get it setup before the kids came or at least before the engineer came. I was working on it at 7:15 AM, and when the kids came at 9:00 I still wasn't done. But I was lucky I had them: They brought all their problem solving heads together and at 9:45 when the sound engineer came in we were all yelling "coooooooll!!," at the images we were recording on the camera, and he didn't get a lot of attention when he walked in!! But he's exactly like us. Crazy about science. He came over to what we were looking at and started joining in with coooooool!!
Then we had a lecture on microphones and cables and a test on the materials presented, (think transducers, high M, low M, 96/24bpp, vs. 48/16bpp) then he taught us about record setup and showed the kids how to record in real life. He connected very well with the kids.
"After that, the poor starving children ate lunch then we made covered boxes, (think colored tissue paper, note stickers, music paper, tons of glue being applied with bristle brushes and everybody asking each other for one of the four pairs of scissors... next time I need 20 pairs) then we went through the fascinating process of making french bread (think awe-inspring monstrously-swelling dough threatening to overtake the mixing utensil left in the bowl during the resting period and a very cloudy-looking kneading party,) which may have been the messiest the kitchen has ever been... sigh! But when most of the loaves were safely in the oven, I put them all to work and they faithfully cleaned up quite a bit of our giant, floury janitorial catastrophe. Anyway, the house smelled wonderful even though it was terrible to look at. 😄hope you enjoyed the bread and don't wait to save it because it won't be so good tomorrow. Remember honey and butter! Though we tackled some big projects today we even got a couple rounds of our two rhythm games AND some quality round robin ping pong!
Ok, I know they are waaay more high tech than we were, but they could not be having more fun than we did.
Please show your kid this video so they can see more about how schlieren flow visualization can be."
Session two included a lot of food from Europe! We made French Crepes, Norwegian Lefse, German potato soup, and REAL BELGIAN WAFFLES. I searched and found a recipe and it looked authentic. I took a bite and memories of Belgium and walking the shopping streets and stopping for "luikse wafels" flooded through me. It was authentic, all right. My daughter put one in her mouth and her eyes popped wide open. "I'm there!" she exclaimed, and ran for the phone to call her dad and tell him we'd pulled it off. Don't let making pearled sugar put you off: I was way more causal and less refined about how even that was done, and it turned out fine.
Session two also included a hand shadow play called "The Bunny Wedding" which I did not videorecord and post for you, because I was either playing the piano for it, or I was laughing too hard. This generally younger set of kids did very well in their final presentation for the parents. The play was mostly written by kids, produced by kids, tickets printed by kids, audience welcomed by kids, extra scenery cut out by kids... We also got a chance to admire the pros! You need to see this amazing video!
In both camps we drilled rhythms for hours... and hours.... and hours!
We also kept illustrated journals and had recording engineer sessions, and a pipe organ field trip at Faith Lutheran Church in Redmond, and two recitals at Peters Creek Retirement! It was a very busy and productive time!
I will need to set next year's dates very early: I have inquiries already about joining next year.
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