Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Progress Tuesday

AE:
Learning: Finishing up Minuet 2
Working Piece: Minuet 2
Struggle: Playing with a bow straight 
Looking forward to: Learning Happy Farmer. (She might be able to skip Minuet 3 for now, since Happy Farmer is a part of our institute repertoire, and then go back to it.)
Favorite Piece to Play: Unsurprisingly Minuet 2 :) She is in general happy to play whatever it is that she is learning currently.

AM:
Learning: French Folk Song.
Working Piece: Twinkles
Struggles: Using very little bow! She got her cello stickers of where she is supposed to play, and it is very little bow!
Looking forward to: Playing Twinkle and French Folk Song with the bow. She is plucking those for now, until she gets a bit better with the bow.
Favorite Piece to Play: Ant Song (cello plucking song where she plucks each string 4 times).

E
Struggle: Making time for everything. Altogether I practice with the girls for close to 2 hours!
Looking Forward to: AM playing more songs on the cello. I love the sound of it so much!

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Progress Tuesday

AE:
Learning: Minuet 2 Part B
Working Piece: Minuet 2 Part A
Struggle: Looking at her bow while she plays.
Looking forward to: Playing all of Minuet 2. She is genuinely excited and is just so into it when she plays it! I think she loves in particular the beginning part.

AM:
Learning: On Violin she is learning Minuet 2. This will be the last piece she learns before she switches to cello completely. On cello we are doing a lot of left hand exercises, starting a bit of French Folk Song.
Working Piece: Minuet 1
Struggles: Violin. She just can't get herself to focus on the violin, because she is so excited for a cello.
Looking forward to: Playing with a bow on the cello. The songs she is playing now are all in pizzicato. We supposedly will start playing with the bow at the next lesson.

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Struggle:  Getting all of the practice items in in the limited time. AM currently has no time to do any sort of review, since she has to keep playing Etude, since that's her recital piece, Minuet 1, as well as learning pieces from Minuet 2.
Looking Forward to: Gavotte! I love Minuets, and I am glad the girls are finally playing those! They just sound so pretty! But Gavotte, there is just something fun about it!

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Progress Tuesday

AE:
Learning: Minuet 2
Working Piece: Minuet 1
Struggle: She knows Minuet 1 well at this point, but she confuses a few C/C#s, and she has a hard time going back and working on specific passages.
Looking forward to: Playing all of Minuet 2. She is generally content with where she is though :)

AM:
Learning: Cello. We had the first real lesson and we have quite a few exercises to do
Working Piece: Etude/Minuet 1 on violin
Struggles: Review Pieces on violin. All of a sudden with less time to do review she has forgotten Perpetual Motion/Allegretto/Andantino...
Looking forward to: MORE CELLO!! Seriously I have never seen this kid so excited about a musical instrument!

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Struggle: Etude! The girls can't seem to remember it! We practice it over and over many times, and still!
Looking Forward to: Seeing the girls in the recital!