Most famous as Maria’s convent, Nonnberg was founded at Salzburg in the eighth century by Bishop Rupert of Worms. The first abbess was St. Erentrudis, who was a niece or sister of St Rupert. The rule of St. Benedict was adopted in the ninth century.
Georg von Trapp acquired a villa in the Aigen district of Salzburg in 1923.
Villa built by Valentin Ceconi in 1863 for Walburga Weinwurm and refurbished in 1883 for statesman and nobleman Hugo Raimund Reichsgraf Lamberg, who was Provincial governor (30 September 1872 – 14 June 1880)
After an opera singer heard the children singing, she entered them for a competition. Their subsequent success enabled them to tour Europe and the United States as a family choir.
Nonnberg was established during the eight century and became the first Benedictine Abbey north of the Alps. Maria was a qualified teacher, when Captain von Trapp requested a governess for several months for his daughter, who was bedridden with rheumatic fever. She expected to remain with the von Trapp family for 10 months, at the end of which she would return to Nonnberg.
Teacher training in Austria was deeply influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Froebel. Singing and nature walks were part of this training to nurture each child to be active and develop an interest in nature.
Maria developed a caring and loving relationship with all the children. She enjoyed singing with them and getting them involved in outdoor activities. During this time, Georg fell in love with Maria and asked her to stay with him and become a second mother to his children. Maria married Captain von Trapp on November 26, 1927.
Georg Johannes Ritter von Trapp (4 April 1880 – 30 May 1947) was born in Zara, Dalmatia, then a Crown Land of the Austro Hungarian Empire (present day Zadar, Croatia). His father was a naval officer, who had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in 1876, which entitled him and his descendants to the style of “Ritter von Trapp” for sons and “von Trapp” for daughters.
Ritter (knight) was an hereditary title of nobility. In order of precedence Ritter ranked above the lowest rank of the nobility, Edler (nobleman), and below Freiherr (baron).
The great grandchildren of the Captain and Maria von Trapp; Sofi, Melanie, Amanda, and August von Trapp have been singing on stages around the world to critical acclaim and packed houses.
Take down those old drapes and make some play clothes. A new production of The Sound of Music began touring in September 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary of the film version, which continues to be the most successful movie musical in history.
Towards a Pedagogy for Emancipation: Education for First Peoples
Dr Chris Sarra an internationally recognised Indigenous education specialist.
Dr Sarra is passionate about effecting sustainable change through positive leadership and mentoring with high expectations for a strong and smart Indigenous population.
He embraces a proud cultural identity and a holistic sense of what it means to be Aboriginal in contemporary Australian society.
Strong and Smart – Towards a Pedagogy for Emancipation tells the story of how Dr Chris Sarra overcame low expectations for his future to become an educator who has sought to change the tide of low expectations for other Indigenous students.
His book draws upon Roy Bhaskar’s theory of Critical Realism to demonstrate how Indigenous people have agency and can take control of their own emancipation.
Dr Sarra is passionate about effecting sustainable change through positive leadership and mentoring with high expectations for a strong and smart Indigenous population. He embraces a proud cultural identity and a holistic sense of what it means to be Aboriginal in contemporary Australian society.
Chris encourages other leaders to embrace the Stronger Smarter challenge of high expectations relationships. His advocacy of the Stronger Smarter approach has inspired transformation in schools across Australia.
IHHP guided the community through the whole creative process of writing, recording and shooting this video. A number of key health messages and community values were explored. The results are testimony of who Bidgy are, where they have come from and where they are going.
The film “Strong and Smart” tells the story of the rise of the Cherbourg State School from a situation of aimless despair and chaos to an institution with a sense of purpose, direction and unity. The film shows the turn around over 4 years, since the arrival of a dynamic new teaching staff led by Chris Sarra, the school’s first Aboriginal principal.
Friedrich Froebel advocated for education in the context of family and community.
Warning: CONTAINS STRONG MAGNETS. Keep away from sensitive devices such as credit cards, computers, magnetic media and medical devices like pacemakers.
Geomag’s Kor Eggs are 3D spherical magnetic playsets with 55 fully playable pieces, that quickly and firmly attach through the wondrous power of magnetism. The Kor Egg offers limitless creations.
Like all of Geomag’s award winning products, the Kor Egg is Swiss made to international safety standards.
Geomagworld SA has fostered simultaneous learning and creativity since 2008. All Geomag products are designed, developed, and produced in Switzerland and follow the highest European and American safety and quality standards.
At Geomag, their priority is designing toys that amuse and stimulate children’s sense of fantasy, curiosity, and creativity. Helping young minds hone their abstract problem solving and complex reasoning skills is crucial for their transition into functioning adults, and all Geomag products reflect that mentality.
Softened peas and sharpened sticks were used by Friedrich Froebel for children to make structures.
Ann-Marie Powell has created a colourful garden design with bright borders to lift the spirits, benches to relax and share a chat on, soothing water features, a bee friendly perennial meadow, edible plants in pots and a stylish kitchen garden.
“Gardens and gardening do more good to heart and soul than they are ever given credit for. It is important that my interpretation on a front garden theme is full of take home ideas. Too many people are paving over their front gardens but anybody can have a beautiful front garden.”
This garden is intended to build awareness of the positive healing effects that gardening can have on people’s health and happiness. Her ideas are designed to be incorporated in both private and community gardens.
BRIO Builder is a unique, wooden based construction system where the child is the constructor!
Junior builders can create sturdy models with realistic details by using the interchangeable play pieces.
Beyond bricks and sticks, Brio Builder make things a child can actually play with!
Real construction, not just simple snap together; comes complete with a hammer, screwdriver, pliers and a wrench. Build a race car, jet plane, construction vehicle and more.
Your adventure is as broad as your imagination
• Helps promote creativity, imagination, fine motor skills and open ended play
• A fun way to practice hand eye coordination.
BRIO Builder encourages children to build their own toys – either from their own imagination or from model pictures. When building, children exercise a number of skills; learning to sort and see patterns, all while making sense of the world around them.
WARNING – This product contains small magnets. Swallowed magnets can cause complications leading to serious infections and death. Seek immediate medical attention if magnets are swallowed or inhaled.
Brothers Chris and Will Haughey began with the simple notion that Honduras needed businesses which offered living wage jobs. Home to beautiful hardwoods, the country could have been the perfect spot for sustainably manufacturing any number of wooden products.
The brothers were inspired by classic wooden toys. Tegu blocks inspire children while addressing unemployment, neglected natural and human resources, and the need for entrepreneurship in Honduras.
“Children use toys to articulate meaning and substance,” says Will, explaining that blocks are the perfect medium because you can stack them into anything you want.
Tegu is positioned more as a high end specialty toy. “It’s definitely a niche product,” said Chris Byrne, who is known as “The Toy Guy” at a website that tracks the toy industry, “And there’s nothing like it in that niche.”
The innovative toys are “wonderfully tactile” and feel great to touch, Byrne said. ” They are kind of a work of art in themselves”, he said, “Something he would not be afraid to put on his coffee table”.
“Some parents like the idea of teaching their children about social issues through toys”, Byrne said. “In addition to the fun of play, it reinforces global responsibility.”
The blocks, which hearken back to traditional play gifts designed by Friedrich Froebel in their simplicity and craftsmanship, seek to unlock creativity in play by avoiding the overstimulation and prewritten scripts that come with so many elaborate mass produced toys.
The first building gifts designed by Friedrich Froebel
Chris and Will Haughey cite research linking imaginative “free play” to important cognitive development, and they seek to use Tegu blocks to open imaginative possibilities and facilitate long term learning.
Chris Haughey first travelled to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa in the spring of 2004, to work with a group that was educating children living and working in an unregulated landfill used by the city as a giant dump. Shocked by a degree of poverty he had never witnessed firsthand before, Chris emailed his investment banker and hedge fund analyst brother Will and together they began dreaming of ways to bring a little of the kingdom of heaven to the impoverished nation of Honduras.
“We came from the capitalist mindset and were convinced we could do something to help,” Will noted in a Daily News interview. “Obviously we wanted to make money, but we also wanted to positively impact the local community.”
The brothers set about establishing a factory in Tegucigalpa seeking to bring “world class employment standards” by offering living wages and prioritizing big picture career growth over merely task based jobs to Honduras, the second poorest nation in Central America.
Harvard undergrad and later Harvard & MIT mathematics professor Tom Lehrer penned this tune in 1945.
He admonishes the athletic team to fight fiercely. He was a first class satirist as is demonstrated by this tune. The Harvard band now plays the song at halftimes and in concerts, as though it were the traditional Harvard song.
One of Tom Lehrer’s live performed songs, “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”, is part of Tom’s second published live performance album, “Tom Lehrer Revisited” and included in “The Remains of Tom Lehrer”, which was released in 2000 and “The Tom Lehrer Collection” CD+DVD, original recording remastered released in 2010.
The most famous football game in Ivy League history – the 1968 Harvard-Yale game – is brought to life in this exhilarating documentary.
Harvard mounts a stunning comeback, scoring 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie the game and tie Yale for the season championship. Although the final score was tied, the miraculous comeback prompted the Harvard Crimson to proclaim in its headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29”.
His uniquely depraved wit has been forced again on an unsuspecting public’ via Tom Foolery, the stage revue based on his trenchant observation of the American scene.
This new songbook, with old favorites unavailable for years as well as never-published songs, is the most comprehensive ever assembled. It contains the words, tunes, piano accompaniments, and guitar chords for these thirty-four classics:
The Langlois Bridge at Arles is the subject of four oil paintings, one watercolor and four drawings by Vincent van Gogh. The works, made in 1888 when Van Gogh lived in Arles, in southern France, represent a melding of formal and creative aspects. Van Gogh leverages a perspective frame that he built and used in The Hague to create precise lines and angles when portraying perspective.
Contrasting colors, such as blue and yellow, were used to bring a vibrancy to the works. He painted with an impasto, or thickly applied paint, using color to depict the reflection of light. The subject matter, a drawbridge on a canal, reminded him of his homeland in the Netherlands.
Langlois Bridge at Arles depicts a woman holding an umbrella as she crosses the Langlois Bridge, following a horse and buggy that just crossed the bridge. The water in the canal subtly reflects the bridge and the few clouds in the sky. Van Gogh uses impasto paint and color to reflect light, much as we would see it in with our eye. Two tall cypress trees and a white house flank the drawbridge which has a moveable center section between stone abutments. The painting is currently at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York launched major retrospectives early in the rehabilitation of his reputation, and made large acquisitions.
The description Tom Lehrer himself made about the song:
“for further details of the life of Alma Werfel, the reader is referred to her autobiography ‘And The Bridge Is Love’.”
Of all the colorful figures on the twentieth century European cultural scene, hardly anyone has provoked more polarized reactions than Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879–1964). Mistress to a long succession of brilliant men, she married three of the best known: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel.
Her admirers regarded Alma as a self sacrificing figure of inspiration to great artists, many of whom indeed exhibited a remarkable devotion to her.
Historian Oliver Hilmes drawing on a trove of unpublished material, much of it in Alma’s own words, succeeds in evoking the atmosphere of intellectual life on the Continent during the first half of the century.
Hilmes goes on to describe life in émigré communities on both coasts of the United States following the Nazi takeover in Europe.
First published in German in 2004, the biography was hailed as a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and sensational gossip. The whiff of scandal surrounding this reputed muse of geniuses helped make the book a runaway best seller.
