This morning I followed a link from Deep Glamour in a post about sprezzatura to this clip of Viviana Durante dancing the lead of Aurora in "Sleeping Beauty." (Embedding disabled, but it's worth a view — the control and balance and precision is amazing. It's been a long time since I've seen a ballet in person, and watching the clip made me remember how much I enjoyed going to the Dayton [OH] Ballet as a child and teenager).
The kids arrived and watched over my shoulder, and so I showed them numerous other clips. Mary Jane in particular was entranced by the ballerinas.
Every once in a while, an afternoon spent surfing YouTube randomly with the kids is a lot of fun, and why not count it as part of the school day? We usually come across at least one thing that's quirky and very cool.
Today it was this clip of a Russian children's choir. They sing two songs. The second is okay, but the first one — "Katuschia", lyrics and translation are here — amazed the children (and me) so much that we had to watch it at least five times. My kids love to watch clips of children performing, they love to hear people singing in exotic foreign languages, they love fancy costumes — it's perfect:
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