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!

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.

E
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!

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!

E
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! 

Progress Tuesday

AE:

Learning: Minuet 2

Working Piece: Minuet 1 (This is her recital piece in 2.5 weeks)

Struggle: Fast passage in Minuet 1, keeping 3rd finger down, when she puts 4th down
Looking forward to: the recital

AM:
Learning: Cello! Posture......... Violin: Also started Minuet 2, and finishing up Minuet 1 line 3.
Working Piece: Etude singles and doubles (That's the recital piece)
Struggles: Proper bow hold for each instrument. Without fail she does violin bow hold when practicing cello and vice versa.
Looking forward to: cello cello cello cello!!!!

E
Struggle: Not enough time! I really need to work on having more effective practices.
Looking Forward to: Minuets! I love them all, and I will be very happy to be "done" with Etude, until AM gets to it again on the cello

Enter Cello

Recently AM decided that violin is overrated. Not really, but she did decide that she LOOOOOOVES the cello. How did she come to that conclusion? Well my brother plays the cello, and he is so awesome and cool (11 years old), and the girls look up to him. That's where she got the idea. Plus you can sit while you play cello! She decided it is hard to stand for an hour... Can't blame her honestly.

We discussed with the school. Apparently they encourage siblings to pursue different instruments. Who knew? When I was registering, they didn't tell me, I just registered for 2 violins. Well it has gotten to the point where they were comparing which MEASURE of Etude/Minuet they were learning... At which point I decided I have had enough, so we gently encouraged AM to consider cello.

AE loves her violin. She loves playing it, and enjoys the music. She also works really hard to fix mistakes/fix posture, etc. AM -- not so much. She prefers to play through songs without being interrupted and be done. She is not great at working on small passages (not that cello would fix that). But it seemed like an easy way to let AE do her thing and encourage AM to switch. (Then I tried to dissuade her, but her mind was made up at that point).

So last week I picked up a tiny 1/8 size cello from a local rental place. We started lessons a couple of days ago. She will continue with violin until the recital at the end of the term, and as of summer she will be doing cello exclusively. In fact I switched her to cello for the summer institute too. She seems very excited, and I hope she continues being excited.

Progress Tuesday

AE:

Learning: Minuet 1!

Working Piece: Etude singles and doubles

Struggle: Remembering to do correct bow hold
Looking forward to: starting to color Minuet 1 boxes!

AM:
Learning: Minuet 1
Working Piece: Etude singles and doubles
Struggles: Left hand thumb, it has gotten better over last week, but we still need lots of reminders
Looking forward to: Next reading lesson

E
Struggle: Posture. I feel like I have to tell the girls over and over again to keep their posture.
Looking Forward to: Hearing a lot more Minuets!

Violin Left Hand Thumb

We have been struggling with this for both girls, so I figured I'd write a post about what worked for us. AM in particular has been having major issues, and her teacher has been on her case to fix it before she can move on.

I have discovered that for us, the problem has stemmed from the fact that AM has been using her hand to actually hold up the violin instead of her chin, so as a result, she was actually using the thumb for support. So once I figure that out, we did a few exercises every day to work on the proper hold.

Exercise 1: Thumb taps.
The idea is to put a finger down on E/A string, and then tap with the thumb on the neck 10/20/40 times. This is hard to do if you use the thumb to hold a violin up.

Exercise 2: No thumb playing.
This was harder to do, but more effective. We did this with scales. The idea is to remove the thumb from the neck of the violin completely and hold it about an inch away, then proceed to play the scale/twinkle. AM needed some help with this, I helped her hold the scroll up, but mostly she managed :)