Emma's piece at the Bach Fesitval

Emma performed this past Sunday at the 22nd annual Bach Festival. She was asked by her teacher two weeks before and while nervous about it at first, she was excited to do it.

Violin and art...

Wednesdays are our busy days. She has violin at 930, art at 1030 and hockey at 5. Not intentional but that is when everything falls. I am still not sure if I like it or not. Makes for a busy day, and usually no other schooling but at the same time, the other days are not being taken up by a class here or there.


Violin went well. She moved one piece to review and started in on a new piece. The new piece, Allegretto is mainly on the D string including her 4th finger on D. Should be interesting since she has not played on the D string much and just started using her 4th finger on the A string with her current piece she is still working on.


Art is always fun. She looks forward to it each week. This week they learned how to draw the basic body using shapes. As we waited for class to start, the teacher told them to free draw. This is what Emma drew. She told me it was a person wearing a dress.



And this is what she drew in class, in the order she drew them.










Not sure hockey is going to happen today. She had a sore throat last night and just told me it still hurts. So I am going to give her the night off and hope that in a few hours she is still feeling "ok" and not feverish. Nothing has hit this household yet but I know it is a possibility still. Nothing that tells me I have to keep her home but going to play it safe and let her rest. Good night for a family movie! (although she is already asking when we are going to do math today so she can't be feeling too horrible!)

Eye opening experience with Emma's violin lessons...

Last week was a rough week for practices. Lots going on here and I have found if we do not do her practice first thing in the morning...well, it just does not get done. So she had no practice last week until the morning of her lesson. I decided to give her the final line for Long, Long Ago because I knew she could memorize it and she played through the song once before we left.

This was her second to last lesson (teacher is moving) and she passed off on Long, Long Ago like I figured. Being that there is only one week left, I figured that the teacher would just work on previous songs and give us some tips to polishing. Nope, she wanted to move onto Allegro. She played through it once for Emma and then wrote the fingers on the music. There are 4 lines but 1,2 and 4 are all the same so I felt a little better. She gave us both lines and Emma will have it memorized by next week.

Before I go into what happened next, she is learning with the Suzuki method. It allows really young children to learn and one of the most important parts of the method is the audio CD that the student is supposed to listen to at least 1x a week. We have dropped the ball on that but lately have been listening a lot. The idea is that they will pick the flow of the music up from having listened to it so much.

So, back to the lesson. Her teacher put the music up on the stand and had Emma play through it once. She does this so Emma can play once but also to check that she put the correct fingers in the correct places (instead of reading notes Emma reads either E, E1, E2, E3, A, A1, A2, A3, and D1 - E, A and D strings, open or finger 1, 2, or 3). So Emma starts playing and to me it sounded really close to how it should. Most of the other songs she gets the notes down but not how the song should REALLY sound. But, then I thought what do I know, music and me do not mix.

Her teacher picked up her violin and had Emma play again and told her to ignore what she (the teacher) was doing. Emma stumbles through it again, but her teacher played along but not exactly the same. When they were done I looked at the teacher and she explained that normally she has Emma follow what she was doing, but since Emma had it down so well, she (the teacher) played melody to Emma. She was really amazed to be able to do that. It is one of Emma's favorites to hum a long with, and I am sure that helped a lot!

As a going away gift to her students, she is taking video of them during the last two lessons and putting it on a DVD. I mentioned I wanted to get a video next week of the two of them playing together like they did during that lesson.

Of course, we need to get our act together this week. We aim for 5 practices (including her lesson) so even though we skipped today I am not too worried. Need to just do it before we start anything else.

violin video

Wanted to add a video of where she is now. Her practice is going to start building her up to play all the Twinkle variations in a row without stopping, while adding in new songs.

The video has her playing "Mississippi Hot Dog" and "1,2, shush 3". She then plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which we are also working on) and then the first line of her new song "Lightly Row." She has taken to the new song better than I thought after playing the same notes for the past 4-5 months. After she starts (and stops) during the new song, you will see her glance over her shoulder at a white board where I wrote down the notes/fingers for the first line. After playing twice today she had it down! I think she got confused in the video since she had played the other songs first.

(Ignore the split second of hockey in the beginning!)

Here is the video that goes with the previous post from yesterday.