The Erskine Family's
"LIVINGBOOKS FOR THE EARS"Newsletter
A free service of www.homeschoolradioshows.com
May 30, 2007
This week's program:
Our 2007 Make-Your-Own-Radio-Program Contest winner
Jonathan Girotti's
Horatius at the BridgeGreetings Friends!
NEW to our site? Be sure to join our list for our weekly updates & free weekly programs!
(just look for the post "Current Archived Programs")!Well, here they are!
We had many GREAT stories submitted this year for our 2007 "Make Your Own Radio Show" Contest, and it was especially tough for our judges to reach a consensus and make a final decision -- but they have finally reached a verdict, and we have our winners. Here they are:
First Place:
Horatius at the Bridge
by Jonathan Girotti & family & friendsSecond Place:
Queen Joanna & the Abbott
by Mary & Laura Kisior and Amanda, Megan & Teresa DominickThird Place:
Arnold Winkelreid
by Nathan PillingEach of these was excellently produced and imaginitively adapted from one of our source stories (from James Baldwin's "50 Famous Stories Retold", which is such a GREAT collection of classic tales, we're working on a great audiobook version of it for release later this summer). We're going to be featuring all three of our winners here on our site over the next three weeks, along with a few more fun entries we had in the competition, so you're going to get a chance to hear how wonderful each of these are. Thanks so much to everyone who entered this, our 5th Annual contest!
Best Wishes,
The Erskines
homeschoolradioshows.com
What do you hope to accomplish this summer? Here's what folks are saying about this resource collection:
How about Training your Boys to have GREAT Manners?
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-- Only $7!What a great set of materials! Thanks for helping us identify some of our "blind spots" with our boys, and giving us "tools" to put together a plan of action. -- The Melvins
Thank you for the Boys and Manners series and these additional items. The Goops are great! We're enjoying the Boys and Manners ebooks very much. Our daughters are benefiting from them too. :) -- The Dunsmuirs
Thank you so much for these great resources. My husband and I doing a manners study with our boys over the summer, we also have a 5 year old daughter
who will join in but it's mostly for the boys. The timing of these resources was excellent and very much appreciated. -- The FillingimsBoy, do we need THIS. Looks great! -- The Wrights
Okay...Here is This Week's Program:
Winner of our 2007 "Make Your Own Radio Program" Contest!
Horatius at the Bridge
by Jonathan Girotti & family & friends
Jonathan Girotti: Horatius, Consul, Porsena, Sextus
Mr. Jeff Wagner: Roman Citizen
Ben Wagner: Courier
Mr. Tom Girotti: General Herminius, Soldier, Senator
Hannah Girotti: Mrs. Horatius
Not pictured: brother Micah Girotti as King Tarquinius.This GREAT dramatization of the classic story of early Rome had us RIVETED to our seats! It is a great historic tale filled with drama, action and heroism! The acting, music, sound effects and production are all wonderful. We asked Jonathan to share some comments with us about putting this together, so we'll let him tell us all about it. Take it away, Jonathan...
Making "Horatius at the Bridge" was a quite a challenge. First off, I hadn't checked the Homeschool Radio Shows website in a while and didn't see the notice of the contest until late February, approximately a month after the opening. With basically only little more than a month to complete it, I knew I had to work fast. After doing a little bit of research into the story of Horatius, I was able to find a very long poem written by a 19th-century Englishman recounting the Horatius story and including a lot more people names and place names that the entry from Baldwin's Fifty Stories. So that gave me good material to base my script on.Give this story a listen yourself and you'll quickly "see" why it was chosen as this year's First Prize winner. Congratulations Jonathan!Then my family graciously consented to be recruited as voice actors for the drama. My dad played an absolutely fabulous General Herminius and my older brother played the bad-guy King Tarquinius. Also, my sister played Horatius' wife. I did some double duty and did a couple different voices, including Horatius and the Consul. My friends, the Wagner family also supplied two characters: the unnamed Courier and the unnamed Roman citizen who helped chop down the bridge.
Sound effects were also fun to do; I spent an entire afternoon in the garage recording clashing metal, banging wood, and other warlike sounds! My brother owns some real swords, and he and I engaged in a mock sword fight to record the sword sound effects.
I also composed the music in about a feverish two-days--about a day before the deadline! It was harder work than I thought -- trying to think up a melody that fit the particular scene I was working on.
I think the story of Horatius was particularly interesting because we normally think of Rome as always being a strong mighty empire. However, there was a time when it was a small nation and had larger, more powerful foes. It is rather ironic that Rome became the mightiest empire and the Etruscans became almost completely forgotten.
So it was really a story about courage and faithfulness to duty in the face of danger. I want to thank my family and the Wagner family for all their help. More importantly, I want to thank God for giving me strength to do what needed to be accomplished.
Horatius at the Bridge
File Size: approx 16 megs / Running time: 17 minutesalternate download site if the above is busy
Horatius at the BridgeREAD THE INSTRUCTIONS below if you are unfamiliar with downloading a file or are having any problems with your download.To download a program, RIGHT click (use the right hand button on your mouse) the link above, and "save target as" (or "save link as") to the directory of your choice.
The file should start downloading right away. If it doesn't, try it again, and follow these instructions carefully. (DON'T cut and paste this link into your web browser -- that will just PLAY the program over the internet (it will be jumpy and start & stop a lot), and will not DOWNLOAD the program. If you want to download it to your computer, you need to follow the above instructions.)
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This file will be available for the next week or two only, so don't put off downloading it if you want a copy.
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See you next week!
Your Friends,
The Erskine Family
PO Box 187 * Canmer, KY 42722
www.homeschoolradioshows.com
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