Tagged: CAJA

  On March 11, in the music room of Blythe Elementary in Huntersville, 25 first- and third-grade children stepped on stage to receive the gift of a new violin. The children are the first class of MusicalMinds NC, a free, classical music program for “at-risk” children modeled upon the famed El Sistema schools of Venezuela. On stage with the children was Eduardo Cedeño, conductor of the Lake Norman Symphony Orchestra and one of El Sistema’s first students.

Writers often are encouraged to look for inspiration in their everyday lives. Tricia Wagner, a Charlotte-based author of short stories for children, found inspiration years ago when she moved west across the country with her husband and two children. Their flight traced what was once the Oregon Trail. “Moving is always hard,” Wagner said in a telephone interview. “But as I was looking out the window of the airplane, I thought, ‘What am I complaining about? What if I’d had to do this as a pioneer?’”

Medicines, needles, strange buttons, there are plenty of things in hospitals you can’t touch – and are tempting for kids to touch.  But a new art installation at the Levine Children’s Hospital turns that on its head. Children are supposed to touch it. 

Leave it to the French to have a name for that specific moment in the atmosphere of Paris when night is nearly finished but day hasn’t quite arrived – not dawn or twilight (they have other words for those), but l’heure bleue, the blue hour.