Johanna Speaks

I will be making my mom's birthday cake on Thursday or Friday. My mom and dad will go to the Sante cruise for her birthday this Saturday morning. I will bring her birthday cake to the lake club on Friday because our friends, the Ramerizes, will be there, so I will make the cake this Thursday or Friday to celebrate her birthday! 

This is what I suggested to my mom for her birthday cake:

German chocolate cake with a raspberry filling and chocolate butter frosting with beautiful flowers at the top. She said she liked that idea. So I will make that!

I will be baking four layers of cake because I will have two layers at the bottom of the cake and two at the top, but the two layers at the top will be much smaller than the two layers of cake at the bottom. I don't know if that made sense, but hopefully, it did. :)

I will do another blog post when I have finished the cake. So I hope it will turn out great! I did draw the cake I wanted to have it turn out to look like, but it looks terrible so I won't put it here. Sorry.

My mom is turning fifty-two years old on July 30th! 

So I took a Spanish exam about a week ago. Our Spanish teacher chose Simeon, me, and a girl in our Spanish class! He chose us because he thought we had the most potential to get high scores on a Spanish exam that was pretty hard to take. He asked us if we would like to do it and we all said yes! He said we could do it whenever we wanted to but do it before we started up the 60-hour Spanish classes that we would be doing in August. So my dad sighed us up on a Monday, which was last Monday. 

Our Spanish teacher told us that we were going to be getting speaking prompts for part of the exam and that we had to speak for at least almost four minutes if we could. It's all right if we can't, but four minutes would be great, and we would be getting a high score if we did talk for four minutes. Four minutes is the longest you can be speaking for. So it will stop recording you when it reaches four minutes. Well, when I did the exam, I didn't speak for four minutes on every one. I did for only one of them but for the rest, I spoke for at least two minutes. It would say like you are doing chores at your house, and your mom tells you, you can't go with your friends until you finish your chores. Then it would say, describe three chores you must do and a fun activity you will be doing with your friends afterward. Then I press recording, and it starts recording me. Sometimes I don't like what I said, and it lets me redo the recording again. 

There are also other stuff they have me doing. But after I did the exam, three people will judge me on how well I did. It took a few days before I knew what score I got. But my teacher told me the next day what my score was. By the way, there were three different things I had to do, so three judges judged me on each one. And I know what scores I got, but before I tell you, I will show you what some things mean. 

So novice low is like maybe a year's worth of Spanish, novice med is like a year and a half, and then novice high is about two years and a half. Then there's intermediate. Intermediate low means four years of Spanish. Intermediate mid is about seven years worth, and then intermediate high is like, I think 9 years don't know for sure. Then there's professional, which I don't even know how many years that is! So like I said earlier, three judges judge each person. And also, the Spanish class we have been taking has only been going for a few months. So we would probably get low scores. So here are the results of mine!

So first, I got a novice high, about two years' worth of studying Spanish. Then I got intermediate low, about four years of studying Spanish, and then for my last one, I got intermediate mid! That's about seven years of Spanish!! I was super happy!! I had only taken Spanish classes for a few months! That is how wonderful our Spanish teacher is!! But out of average, I got an intermediate low, which is pretty good! The reason I got intermediate mid was because, in one of the recordings I did, I spoke for four minutes! And that was, again, the only recording that I spoke for four mins. 

Today I am going to be talking about Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann is a famous composer. He composed lots of classical music. For one thing, I didn't know his first name was Johann! You say it like this ( yo..han). If you add an (a) to it, it's my name! Johanna. 

Here are some facts about Johann Sebastion Bach:

Johann was born in Eisenach, Germany, on March 21, 1685. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was the director of the town musicians, and his family included teachers, composers, church organists, and court musicians. After his parent's death, the 10-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at St Michael's church in Ohrdruf. Johann Christoph instructed him on the Clavichord and exposed him to the works of great composers of the time. 

Bach was very skillful and talented and would explore different harmonies and foreign styles in his works. He believed that " The aim and end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." 

Bach married twice and had twenty children, four of which followed in his footsteps and went on to have a musical career, honoring the family tradition. 

Also, in 1717 he challenged harpsichordist Louis Marchand to a keyboard duel. Marchand accepted but quickly realized he would suffer a humiliating defeat and opted not to show up on the contest day. 

Here is some music he composed:

I got a binder that I can put my music in! I got it from Mrs.Orr! Mrs.Orr is a lady who plays piano at our church. She is a super good pianist! And she sings while she is playing the piano. She even helped out as a singing director a long time ago for a choir! Anyways, she just returned from going on a vacation with her husband, and they have been gone for a month. In the meantime, I have been playing violin for the church while Abbygail ( the one who usually plays violin) plays the piano. She is a really good piano player and violin player. And Nick is playing guitar. So when Mr. and Mrs.Orr came back, Abbygail went back to the violin. And now Abbygail and I will be playing violin together for church. We did play some songs for bible study last night on Tuesday. That went great, but I got confused with the music, and there was a three-padge song! So I couldn't put all the pages on one music stand fast, but Abbygail could, though! 

And Mrs.Orr saw that I was struggling to put the music on the music stand fast enough that she gave me a binder so I could put all the songs in and flip the page to go to a different song fast. I said, "Thank you so much! This will be super helpful!".

I am super happy that I got to have a binder! I printed out a music drawing and slipped it on the front of the binder. It now looks really cool! 

Here are pictures of the binder:

We went to Chester for a church service during the week of July. It was a prayer service for the nation of the United States of America that copied what George Washington would have followed in prayer in an Anglican church during his time. It also had extra choral music from songs of that time. And so we went to the place on July fourth. 

Here is the church service link:

https://fb.watch/lE2aQrHZtP/