Festival and Spring in BC

I keep seeing the lovely California spring pictures you are all posting, Aunt Patricia with her blooming plum trees, Shannon posted pretty pictures of the lush greenness while she was doing some yard work a while ago, and quick peek at Mom's blog showed me blooming Almond trees.

I thought I would show you what last Sunday mornings spring rain looked like around here.

A look down the street:

And our house. It was a good snow, you can see how wet it is by looking at the shovelled driveway. It was 1C at the time, so just above freezing. Big fat wet snowman building snow flakes.

Every year there is a Festival of fine arts here in town. Kids prepare pieces and perform in front of adjudicators who give them feed back. Kids of all ages perform anything from memorized poems, pieces of plays, all sorts of dance and musical instruments.

It so happens that my kids have a wonderful teacher, who has a huge fear of public speaking. She feels it is an important skill to learn and insists that the children in her class take part in the poetry portion of the festival. She has a speech trainer come into her classroom as part of a class project and has the entire class perform a group piece together.

In her classroom it is mandatory that all her 2nd and 3rd graders perform at least one solo poetry piece. It is optional for the 1st graders but many choose to do it. SeaBass is no longer in this class room any more, but he chose to do two poems and spent a lot of after school time with the speech coach memorizing a preparing his speech.

I broke the rules and recorded the kids during their performances. Here is Q with his first poem. I will post the others soon.