With Kids

Singing, drumming, and music, oh my! Once a month, at the MSU Community Music School in East Lansing, the Ten Pound Fiddle hosts a children’s music workshop called Fiddle Scouts. There are music options for kids of all ages: a 0-5 year-old group, a 6-12 group, and a jamboree for pre-teens and teens who already know how to play an instrument.

MSU will host its annual day of percussion this Sunday October 26, at East Lansing’s MacDonald Middle School. East Lansing High School’s drumline will perform and be critiqued at 4:35 pm. MSU’s Percussion Ensemble will perform at 1:10 pm and the MSU Drumline will perform at 5:00 pm. High school drumlines from Lansing Eastern, Mason, Troy, Olivet, Okemos, Port Huron, Farmington, Utica, Waterford Kettering and Harrison will also perform. Section clinics for snare, tenor, bass and cymbals will be offered for the students around noon. Admission is $5 for all adults at the door.

High school water polo districts for East Regions 3 and 5 will be held this weekend at East Lansing High School. The cooperative team of Holt/East Lansing (HOTEL) will host teams from Grand Blanc, Grand Ledge, Haslett, Okemos, Ann Arbor Pioneer, Chelsea, Dexter and Saline as they battle it out for a place at the regional tournament Oct. 31/Nov. 1 at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor. HOTEL is currently ranked in second place with a 3-1 record in District 3 play—the highest ranking the combined team has ever had going into the tournament. HOTEL faces Dexter at 7:45 p.m. on Friday night.

Altu’s is owned by chef Altaye Tadesse, and many of the menu options are her family recipes.

The community of East Lansing will have the chance to enjoy some impromptu, “surprise” concert venues within their own homes and lawns this coming Sunday, September 28, 2014. For four hours during their annual “Night Out” Fundraiser, groups of four to five East Lansing High School (ELHS) orchestra or band students will join parent volunteers as they “carol” at various homes in the area, providing entertainment and asking for donations to the ELHS music program. 

The possible closing of the daycare program at Bailey Community Center will be discussed tonight at City Council's work session, and tensions are expected to be high. Many members of the Bailey neighborhood have been strongly opposed to the possible closing, partly out of fear that the move is a step towards the City closing and possibly selling off the Community Center building altogether.

Southeast Marble Little Free Library creator Jessica Coates, is a doer of projects, and a maker of things. When she started seeing miniature “free libraries” on Pinterest and around town, she decided to make one herself. “I think we have a great neighborhood,” said Coates, “and I just thought it would be a really good addition and would provide the children and adults in our neighborhood with a place to drop and pick up books, to recycle and reuse them.”

In a recent meeting with a group of concerned citizens, City Manager George Lahanas revealed he is planning on September 23 to ask City Council to close the daycare center at Bailey Community Center. Bailey residents fear that the ultimate endpoint of this process may be closure of the Bailey Community Center as well as possible sale of the Bailey school building. The motivation for the closing is primarily budgetary.

Enterovirus is sweeping across the Midwest – and according to a local pediatrician, it may now have reached the East Lansing area. We are in the middle of enterovirus season, which runs largely unnoticed each year from July through October despite millions of infections, but the presentation of one particular strain of enterovirus has been garnering the attention of many East Lansing-area experts and laypersons alike for the volume of cases and severity of symptoms being attributed to it.