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The big push in the past few months has been to find a balance between more autonomy and responsibility for Erin in her practising, and the ongoing need for guidance and facilitation in problem-solving. She's now wrapping up the Vivaldi g minor concerto, 3rd movement and trying to keep the weighty Book 4 and 5 repertoire firmly within her grasp. Two complete Vivaldi Concerti and the Bach Double are a lot to retain when they've all been learned in the past 6 months. She's practising about a third of the time completely independently, and taking daily responsibility for her review work. After some growing pains, the independent practising is proving increasingly diligent and efficient. Eight seems pretty young for this, I agree, but she's always craved autonomy and independence, this kid, easily falling into patterns of conflict and resistence, and since we were wanting her to take more responsibility for musical details, this practising independence fits with the "total program".

We've opted not to do an institute this summer; Noah wasn't quite ready. Instead Erin will again do the local music summer school on piano, with an orchestra option on violin. She'll also have the chance to work on three or four violin-piano duet numbers with a pianist friend of hers who will be visiting for a week. The two girls live 9 hours apart but became fast friends last summer. They're quite well-matched on their respective instruments. It should be a productive and enjoyable partnership.

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All I can say is it's lucky we're homeschooling. Music is taking up a lot of time, especially as Erin's piano abilities have begun to catch up to her violin abilities. We now spend over 2 hours a day practising the two instruments, and that doesn't include the time and energy devoted to lessons (and piano is now requiring an all-day out-of-town excursion), theory classes, group classes and orchestra rehearsals.

After a couple of weeks of really conflict-ridden practising, we seem to be back in the swing of things. Although Erin goes through regular spurts when she is extremely difficult to work with during practising, she's always adamant that she doesn't want to quit studying either instrument. So we keep trying to find ways to work together productively, even when it the task seems insurmountable. Recently we've been dealing with the loss of structure of weekly lessons, as Erin's grandma-violin-teacher is abroad for several weeks. We've started a regular practising challenge. She's trying for 64 days in a row. My own students were all asked to choose a goal, either 16, 36, 64 or 100 days in a row, and Erin has joined in with a 64-day challenge. She's already 40 days into a piano-100-day-self-challenge, so adding violin isn't such a big deal.

So here we are again, out the other side of the recent dark tunnel and we both feel happy about how things are going. We've done the "spade work" on the Bach Double 2nd violin part and are gradually putting the 1st and 2nd violin parts together. Almost half the piece is fitting together securely now. Our practising routine now includes some three-octave scales and arpeggios, a shifting exercise or two, some brief vibrato-development exercises, work on the Bach Double as a duet, polishing work on at least one other Book 4 piece, work on the two "new" pieces at the start of Book 5, playing through a review piece from each of the earlier books and a couple of fiddle tunes (Tam Lynn's Reel is a current favourite), and a few minutes spent on orchestra music. No wonder it seems to take a while!

We're toying with the idea of a summer Suzuki institute, but not certain. Because Erin's everyday life revolves around music, musical friends and musical events, rather than school, institutes aren't quite as much the unique immersion experience that they are for some children. I'm anticipating that Noah, her younger brother, won't be emotionally ready to be enrolled as a student this summer, and I'm not exactly relishing the thought of single-parenting my way through an intense institute week, with the needs of two younger siblings being to some extent set aside. We may opt again for last summer's solution: piano enrollment at our local (traditional) music summer school, with orchestral participation on violin as an extra hour. That way Noah and Sophie can spend a certain amount of time at home with their dad, playing and having their needs met more adequately.

One of the things that delights me about Erin's unique situation as a young, fairly advanced violinist in a small rural program is her lack of any condecension or competitiveness concerning other students. Perhaps it's partly her nature, partly the fact that she's not in an age-stratified environment at school, and partly the collection of musical friends she's blessed with, but she is not becoming a musical snob as she becomes more and more capable. She loves participating in group classes with the Book 1 kids, loves playing in community orchestra and giggling over missed entries with the grownups, loves "taking notes" for her little brother during his Twinkle practising.

Parental deschooling

This is a post I discovered in my e-mail "sent" file on September 1, 2007. It was written over five years previously. I've copied it in below and adjusted the blog entry date to match the original writing:

Katherine wrote
"My concerns are mainly centred around the potential for personality conflict between my children and me. I am trained as an engineer and am naturally quite competitive and goal-oriented. I am concerned that I would push my kids too hard. Part of what I don't like about the school they are in now is the acceptance of mediocrity."

I replied:

My kids have never gone to school in the first place, so I had a gradual "apprenticeship" to homeschooling... we just slipped quietly in the door the year my daughter didn't start Kindergarten, while we didn't change anything in our family routine. But I trained as a physician, and I tend to be very goal-oriented and strong-willed, so the things you are worried about would be exactly those I'd worry about in your situation: expectations too high, power struggles, and so on.

What I've discovered through my gradual apprenticeship in home-based learning is that it's at least as much an education for the parent as it is for the child, and I mean that in a very, very good way. My understanding of education is so much richer and more thoughtful (still learning, though!) than it ever would have been otherwise. I have changed... I have gradually embraced a totally new set of beliefs about the process of learning.

It's been mostly a liberating, empowering experience, though I'll confess I've resisted some of it and still do. I discovered that the set of assumptions that govern school are meaningless outside that context. Things like "high levels of structure and organization are required to assure you're doing a proper serious job", and "things need to be learned in a specific order and mastered before moving on", and "children won't learn anything hard unless they're forced to" and "the child is the recipient of learning dispensed by a teacher". The entire foundation of my understanding of the nature of education has been gradually knocked out from underneath me. In place I've built up something new, something that's more trusting of human nature and respectful of the individual experiences of unique human beings, something that's making me a happier, stronger, less neurotic person.

So if you're willing to call into question all your assumptions about education (and, by extension, parenting), I think you'll find that home-based learning will grow on you in a very good way. Your children will show you where you need to grow and change and learn.

At the outset I read lots of good books about homeschooling and natural learning. This might appeal to the engineer in you. Here are a few you might ferret out...

Better Than School by Nancy Wallace. Life and trials within an unschooling family of preciously artsy, yet in many senses, perfectly normal kids. Very honest writing without pretence. Out of print but probably the best book, overall, about homeschooling and natural learning, that I've ever read. Track it down through inter-library loan if you can.

How Children Learn by John Holt ... observations concerning that natural learning of children, and the way in which we well-meaning adults often derail and destroy kids' natural aptitudes and motivation for learning

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson. Excellent persuasive writing about *why* you should homeschool.

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto ... more on "why", with a more philosophical spin about the flawed nature of public education

No Contest: the Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn... since you mentioned your competitive nature, you might find this one really interesting. It's not about homeschooling in any direct way, but it's all one big ball of wax. Very persuasive. Kohn's book about rewards and incentives ("Punished by Rewards") is also an excellent antidote to any carrot-and-stick tendencies one might have.

My eldest child is very strong-willed and so am I. My general approach is that if she develops resistence, there's something wrong with the whole equation, not something wrong with her. So if she's not wanting to do something that I honestly believe is exceedingly important, I need to adapt her environment to inspire her, not force her. Any more controlling strategy is doomed. Absolutely doomed. She is training me to give her the autonomy she craves, and when I trust her enough to give it, she amazes me. Trust is the crux of it. I am getting better at trusting that, in the absence of coercive parenting, she really will want to grow to be an intelligent, responsible, productive and capable human being. She rewards my trust.

I have a feeling that if my elder daughter were in school, we would never have had to learn how to really get along. This is the gift (and the curse!) of homeschooling: you will develop deep, rich and complex relationships with your children, relationships which will be able to weather all sorts of potential conflict and stress. There's simply no choice. You will learn. They will show you when you're moving the wrong direction. They will show you what they need.

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Things just keep rolling along for Erin. She's got a nice, stable vibrato now and is shifting easily. She's wrapped up her first polishing of the three Seitz Concerto movements in Book 4, and has made short work of note-learning for the Vivaldi a minor 1st movement which she is playing confidently now while preparing to start the 3rd. Six months ago I would have predicted her forward progress would slow at the early-Book-4 level. Now I'm sure it will slow by the late-Book-4 level, but I've been wrong so far and I'm prepared to be wrong again.

I'm struck lately by how the perfectionism and volatility of the past is so much smaller a problem now. She is still prone to melt-downs, but they come at really understandable times. For instance, after four metronome runs through the last page of the Vivaldi 1st movement, she develops a recurrent stumble while trying the arpeggio sixteenths in the 3rd movement with the metronome for the first time. Big deal: I'd probably have a meltdown in the same situation myself! Maturity is giving her more resources to tackle bigger things.

In early November she attended a large regional youth orchestra weekend workshop, a thrilling success in a number of ways. This was her first serious orchestral experience, and she was able to pick from a smorgasbord of repertoire choices, including some very challenging pieces. The "Tutti" orchestra comprised 147 players, from age 7 (Erin) to senior high-schoolers and some adult students and teacher-ringers as well. The final concert, after two days of intensive rehearsing, was in a brand-new performing arts theatre, so it really was a fine introduction to "big-time orchestral playing".

The left hand posture problems continue to be a thing of the past. The big push over the past 6 months has been to get her to take responsibility for musical details like dynamics and phrasing. She can play exceedingly musically, and mimicks musical details extremely well, but has shown little interest in actually internalizing them and making use of them without reminders and prods. Probably this will come with maturity as well, but her grandmother-teacher and I continue to try to push the envelope a little by asking her (over and over and over, of course) to please, for example, remember the contrast in dynamics at the end of the fourth section.

We'll be celebrating Christmas in our characteristic low-key way. Erin will be involved in three concerts. In one of them she'll be playing arrangements of a couple of Christmas tunes in a violin-cello-harp trio with a local cellist friend (also age 7) and his mom. These "community connections" are, I think, really important. She'll also be joining the inter-generational local community orchestra after Christmas. She's been attending rehearsals since infancy, so this venue sort of feels like "home" to her. I think the other orchestra members are looking forward to it as much as she is.

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Erin took her violin to the local agricultural fair ("Buskers Welcome" said the posters) and played her review repertoire for about 25 minutes whilst standing beside her open violin case. Technical clarity: B+. Cuteness factor: A+. Proceeds: $70!

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Two weeks ago Erin moved onto a really nice eighth-sized violin and is really enjoying the depth and clarity of tone the new instrument is affording her. It's still a little bit of a stretch, but she's coping fine. Starting next week we'll be back into a regular routine of weekly lessons, so I guess it's time for an update.

Erin's summer workshop experience this year focused on piano at our local music summer school. She did participate in the beginner orchestra on violin, but unfortunately there just wasn't a realistic option for a Suzuki violin institute for her this year. Nonetheless, she's continued to barrel ahead in her learning.

She finished the Book 3 repertoire up in mid-July and is now ready to start polishing the second piece in Book 4. Her note-learning continues to come readily, and her posture is generally reasonable. Her vibrato has gained stability in the past few weeks and is occuring freely throughout her repertoire. Last year at this time she was working on The Two Grenadiers in mid-Book 2 and now she's easily mastering Book 4 repertoire, with decent vibrato, much-improved posture, good shifting facility and reasonable sight-reading skills. So it feels to me like she's finally reaping the rewards of her early start, rich environment and diligent work.

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Big news, of a magnitude that I wasn't even aware of until I realized my last contribution here was just two months ago. Erin's left hand has gone snap! into a wonderful neutral position, her fingers are flexing gently and accurately from the base joints and her intonation has improved astronomically as a result. I have no idea why it suddenly happened, but it did. Perhaps it was related to the early introduction of position-work and the daily exercises utilizing rapid back and forths to harmonics. Or perhaps she just decided it was time. At any rate, she's now rollicking through Book 3 (she'll be starting the Gavotte in g minor next week), is comfortable in third position, is working on shifting and beginning to get ready for vibrato. Her tone is also miles better, her shoulders are half-way relaxed and her general appearance of comfort with the instrument is an order of magnitude better.

She's also become a highly motivated and skilled sight-reader in the past couple of months. She started Joanne Martin's I Can Read Music book 1 just before Christmas and is now confidently completing it. Every day she does a full lesson and there rarely seems to be any teaching, explaining, reinforcing or practice necessary. The new rhythms and notes just seem to roll off her fingers.

Practising has become, in the past few months, a reasonably comfortable part of our daily routine. It's still very hard to get it initiated, but once we're going she's attentive, motivated and enjoying things. Review makes up almost 70% of our time, and she's been very diligent about consolidating recent pieces with continued daily work, especially considering how quickly she's acquired them. We now have five big "recent pieces" that get daily polishing work, in addition to her regular rota of review repertoire.

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Things are continuing to move ahead for Erin at a rewarding, steady pace. She's working on Beethoven Minuet now and is looking forward to starting Book 3 in the next couple of months. Although practising is never easy for her to get initiated, she is still doing the better part of an hour a day on each of violin and piano. The focus on review continues, with older review and the playing of recently polished pieces comprising the larger proportion of her practice time.

We're also now doing a regular improvisation exercise and some note-reading practice every day. Both of these endeavours are coming along really nicely. I am an amazed and delighted observer of her improv efforts. She uses sequences, specific bowing/articulation patterns, rhythmic motifs and runs of perfectly plotted-out passing notes to reach cadences as planned. It's amazing to realize that she really is internalizing, integrating and generalizing all the musical conventions she's encountering in her studies. They are truly a part of her now.

Posture continues to be an issue, of course. The best I can say is that things aren't getting any worse, and that she does now seem to be occasionally interested in autonomously setting and monitoring good posture habits in her easy review repertoire. We're still a long way from having good replacement habits established, but there's a glimmer of interest now, I think, in her fixing her own problems. I'm trying to gently persuade her that she's closing in on the repertoire level where her posture problems are going to become technically limiting for her (Book 4, as I see it) and that there is some urgency involved.

The other issue that is continuing in the forefront is that of role-modelling. The only students in the area who are more advanced than she are two teenagers. It would be so nice for her to have students she could look up to, whose posture, tone, musicianship and technical facility she could aspire to. She's doing amazingly well to maintain her diligence when she knows not a single other child under fourteen who puts anywhere close to as much committment into musical study of any description as she. The best I can hope for is to give her a little taste of a peer group at the occasional institute, and to the best of my ability give her contact with children and adults who take any pursuit seriously enough to work diligently at it every day. It's a tall order.

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So far so good! We returned home, made the switch to a tenth-sized instrument, and have established a routine of daily practising. The focus on review continues, with Erin spending about 80% of her practising time playing through her previously learned repertoire. She really enjoys the systematic nature of this, and we now have a review book which comprises her permanent repertoire record. Within this are pages for each piece which list the teaching points and reminders for review, and give a mechanism for counting repetitions. She's working from scratch to accumulate 100 documented repetitions of each piece.

We've been working well together on detail work in The Two Grenadiers and Witches' Dance is coming along nicely. We'll be starting regular lessons with her Grandma this week. For the past couple of years we've scheduled lessons only when we felt a particular need and desire, but a more regular schedule seems to feel right for all of us now. She already has such a schedule for piano lessons, so it's nothing new.

The posture issues all still need work.... the hunched shoulders, the squeezing left hand, and a somewhat wobbly, insecure bowhold. We intend to attack them in this order, since the shoulders are part of the cause of the more distal problems, and the bowhold is the least problematic of the bunch. She has made significant gains in the shoulder posture in the past month, and I have almost totally stopped reminding or correcting her on this. I'm hoping she'll notice how nice it is to play without me picking away at her posture and find this motivating when it comes time to work on the next posture task.

Now that we're doing lots of good practising on both violin and piano, I'm realizing what a big committment it is to do both instruments "properly". Sometimes more than two hours a day are spent on musical things at home, once we include the improvisation, unstructured review playing on piano, and the theory work she's doing (partly on the computer). Two instruments would certainly not work for most six-year-olds attending school, but homeschooling makes it a possibility for us.

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During the fall we managed only sporadic lessons. As a result, practising was a struggle for a couple of months. Then Erin decided the time had come to do some intensive remediation on her left hand position. At the summer institute in Calgary her master class teacher had "planted five seeds", ideas for focusing on posture. Most of these related to her left hand (wrist, thumb, finger independence) and so Erin diligently practised 100 Twinkles with perfect left hand position. She then scheduled a lesson with her Grandma to surprise her with her new posture. A couple of days before the lesson, when her Grandma attended a group class as an observer, Erin intentionally squashed her wrist and clamped her thumb, to preserve the "surprise". She thought this was the cleverest thing!

The surprise came off nicely, but for some reason it wasn't enough to carry her out off the plateau she was on. I think some of it may have had to do with the energy that was going into her second instrument, piano. She'd just begun studying piano, and was finding it very gratifying, and not nearly as difficult as the violin. She was learning a half dozen little primer pieces every week or two, and no one was hassling her about tone and intonation and posture, and everyone thought she was doing terrifically, even though all she did was play, not really practise the piano.

(By way of explanation, I should say that I don't think this would have been the time for Erin to start a second instrument if not for two things: first, as a homeschooler, she had the time, and second, as the daughter of her primary violin teacher, and the grand-daughter of her secondary violin teacher, she needed a teacher-student relationship outside the family.)

At any rate, we had our typical winter lull in violin work. I was dismayed to see the gains she'd made in her left hand position begin to slip away, and the tension in her neck and shoulders worsen. I waited expectantly for the inevitable end of the lull. And waited. And waited. And then I couldn't stand waiting any longer, seeing the posture gradually worsen. She was practising, somewhat reluctantly, every couple of days, but not really working with me, just putting in the time, playing.

I scheduled some regular lessons for her, and decided that I was, no matter what, going to make sure she played every day and actually worked on a little bit of technique. As had been the case two years earlier, it wasn't so much anything I did, it was mostly just a change in my attitude and orientation. I was going to make this work! I was going to help get my daughter over the hump. Her resistance had been just enough to reduce my enthusiasm for daily practising. The reduction in my enthusiasm prevented the semi-regular practising we were doing from being stimulating and enjoyable. And so the lull persisted, until I resolved to pick both of us up by our bootstraps. Miraculously (and with the aid of a few creative games) it worked. Within two or three lessons her posture (all of it! not just the left hand, but the shoulders, neck and head, too) seemed to fall into place. There were days when she actually looked gorgeous playing!

And of course, the repertoire began coming as well. In December we'd begun dabbling in Gossec Gavotte. In early March we attacked it seriously. Now, at the end of May, it is very nicely polished, almost recital-ready, and she's just finished learning Brahms Waltz.

Locally we've finally managed to get group classes happening on a regular basis. Erin has a number of good friends amongst my small group of students, but she falls in a funny place because she started violin so much younger than they did. From a social standpoint she prefers the beginner class which includes her younger brother and her agemates, all pre-Twinklers or new Twinklers. But from a musical standpoint, she's a better fit for the mid-Book-1 to Book 4 group made up of 8 to 13-year-olds. So she flits back and forth between the two groups, attending as much of both as she can. At any rate, the group exposure can't be hurting her, and I'm sure she's helping to inspire some of the other children, too.

Things seem to be going fairly well, but I'm doing my best not to get complacent. I know the posture issues aren't solved yet. Everything still collapses into knots when she's distracted, annoyed or coping with new technical details. I hope we can keep the momentum going for a time. It's so nice to see her enjoying her progress again, working more-or-less-willingly on details, and becoming more comfortable with taking guidance and suggestions on polishing details.

Her piano playing has become more challenging in the course of the year: she's learning to read music and is now having to cope with changes in hand position, technique exercises, and detailed practice "hands separately". It's a relief to the violin teachers in her life to see her needing to use diligence and repetition in her piano work! Somehow it seemed unfair that it should come so easily at first. But I have to remind both myself and her that it only came easily because of all she'd already learned on the violin.

This summer, to cap off her third year of violin playing, we travelled across Canada for (among other things) a week-long Suzuki institute in Waterloo, Ontario. In the month prior, we made review work a big focus and noticed grand strides in tone production. Motivation ran high, and the institute was a positive experience. For once Erin was in classes where their were other children her age, rather than children who were all older than her. She made friends, established a lot of positive independence from her mother, and was incredibly focused, cheerful and attentive. It was hard to believe this was the same child who had been in outer space during group classes at the Penticton institute two years earlier.

Erin is now poised for a switch to a tenth-sized instrument. And time will tell whether we go through our annual fall slump. The long camping and visiting trip home from Ontario was of course a violin-free time, and it may be difficult to re-enter regular home life and daily practising without that sense of let-down. Wish us luck!

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By mid-spring, Erin was showing some interest in re-mastering some of her more challenging review repertoire. We began working gingerly together. Things began falling back into place gradually. But there was still the big hurdle of Etude staring us in the face. Despite lots of work on G-major fingering and scales, she'd been more or less stuck at that first phrase for the better part of six months. I was dreading taking on the challenge with her again. She clearly disliked the piece because of all the frustration it represented.

On a whim, I suggested one evening that we sit down and write a "hate letter" to Etude. Here is what Erin dictated:

Dear Etude

I understand that you are an important piece. You are the first G major piece but I don't like you very much right now. Right now I'm a little frustrated with you. I promise I will come back to you sometime later, but right now I am planning to move ahead to Minuet 1 and leave you alone. I hope you will understand. Right now I think you are nasty and awful and bad and yucky and mean and a rascal too.

Love, Erin

And so we began work on Minuet 1. Within two weeks, there was good progress and we decided it was time to schedule a lesson with Grandma again. At that point I reminded Erin about her behaviour at her last lesson, and explained that it was because of this behaviour that we had gone without a lesson for so long. This appeared to really sink in.

In the six weeks since that first lesson, Erin has done very well. We've only managed to squeeze in a couple of formal lessons, but she is working well with me at home. The posture troubles are beginning to improve a little. Minuet 1 was easily learned, without any difficulty with the G-major fingering and intonation. Soon she was teaching herself new repertoire: Minuet 2, Chorus (despite my requests to the contrary: it's a Book 2 piece she shouldn't yet be learning), and, most recently, a successful return to the once-hated Etude, which she has mastered in two days.

Most interestingly, her improvisation has continued, but has slipped into the keys of G-major and E-minor. She's had a successful performance as a "guest soloist" on a piano-teacher-friend's student recital. She played Allegro and Minuet 1 with confidence, pleasure and reasonable posture to boot!

This year Erin has learned very little in a tangible sense. She's mastered three or four pieces, a new fingering position and some new bowing patterns. Her posture skills have deteriorated a little. But she has become infinitely more comfortable with playing by ear, she now thinks of the violin, I believe, as something she does, not something I coddle her into doing. I have learned the importance of trusting her own sense of readiness. I have become more humble. I now know that I cannot motivate my own child, I can only create the conditions under which she might motivate herself. I have learned to honour her unconventional learning path. At least I hope I have learned these things. And I hope she has come to trust my commitment to honour her sense of readiness.

Erin is five now, still playing on a sixteenth-sized violin. We will be attending a medium-sized highly reputable summer institute this summer, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her brother will be enrolled in an infant music class for under-threes, but he is already studiously playing Twinkle rhythms on A and E, asking for daily lessons, and showing signs of having learned tremendous amounts from his sister. I suspect I will be treading the pre-Twinkle path again soon!

A day in the life

It's mid-morning and Erin and Noah are playing with Duplo. They have built something they are calling a "mooseum" which has incorporated almost every block we own. Each doorway serves a specific imaginary purpose. A windmill apparently supplies the museum with power. There is a large parking lot for cars and trains. The museum is popular and very busy today. The "less fierce" animals, those with soft fur, reside in a special area where they are looked after by the Red Guy. The Blue Guy is feeding meat and bones to the fiercer animals in another area. A monkey is balancing on the fridge but keeps falling off. Erin and Noah laugh every time this happens. The train is leaving on a tour of the museum grounds. The Green Guy, who drives the train, gives a running commentary of the exhibits, by way of Erin. The tour encircles the play room, winding under the legs of the piano bench, over to the computer desk where am sitting with the baby, around the couch and back to the museum.

I adore my kids, and I love to watch them play like this. Noah is wearing just his pyjama bottoms and I watch his pointy shoulder blades wander beneath his skin as he reaches across a tower for a blue block. He is just learning to talk, and we are discovering how much he has learned without us knowing. Erin's hair is a mess; she is still wearing her pyjamas too. But I see how she watches Noah with the same fascination I hold for both of them. She loves watching him learn and is as delighted as he is with his growing abilities. "See, this one is blue-red-blue-red", she says, pointing to a pattern in a tower, "and this one is yellow-green-yellow-green. Let's keep going the same way."

I always knew that young children had tremendous learning potential. I understood that their boundless delight in exploring and creating made them eager to learn in ways they often weren't thought capable. I knew that as a parent I would want to try to tap into that eagerness. I wanted to help my children grow to be confident, contented and capable members of society, and I figured that supporting them in their early learning would build a solid foundation for their continued success in school.

When I was pregnant with Erin, we had the chance to relocate to the small town where we now live. We loved the town, but the move would mean I'd have to give up my job, and my husband would take a cut in income. The town reputedly had a great K-12 school, and looked like a wonderful place to raise children. We thought it the financial sacrifices were worth making: I could stay at home with our children in the early years, and they would have a great school to move on to when they reached school age.

The move worked out almost exactly as we expected. Chuck is a family physician, and although he works only half days at the clinic, he provides one-in-two on-call coverage for the local hospital and its emergency room. It is a lot of responsibility, but much of it entails hanging out at home with a pager, where he is present as a member of the family. I am also a family physician, but I work only occasionally at a well-woman clinic. I now also teach violin to a handful of students a couple of afternoons a week. Most of the time I'm home and with my children and I'm happier there than anywhere. The community where we live is as terrific as we had thought: diverse, creative, warm and tolerant, with a healthy sense of interdependence. And the public school is indeed a good one, inclusive, friendly and innovative.

But Erin will not be going to kindergarten next fall. Instead, she'll be doing pretty much what she's doing this morning. We have started to call it homeschooling.

She has now flitted over to the computer, where Noah has been browsing through a phonics-based pre-reading program and is encountering some difficulty. The piano bench is in front of the computer most days since it will seat two or even three of us at once. Erin is reading well, and Noah is only just learning his letters and letter-sounds, but they enjoy working at things which are not exactly at their level, especially when it means they can do it together. They don't always get along; in fact they've just had a couple of "mouse fights": the fleeting shrieks and wails that occur when they can't agree on who should be in charge of the computer mouse. But these eruptions are quickly quelled without my intervention; they spend all day together and are very well-versed in compromising and making amends.

The computer is a large part of my children's learning. I used to worry about it turning them into overstimulated multimedia snobs who would never enjoy reading or playing outside. I don't worry much any more. We do try to stay away from a lot of arcade-style skill-drill type programs. We have a lot of software that encourages browsing and free exploration, and involves large doses of creativity. I've seen the advantage of computers in giving pre-readers ways to access information and ideas independently. And most importantly, Erin and Noah do seem to self-regulate their computer time. We set no limits, and yet they still spend lots of time with books, do lots of drawing and building, and run around both indoors and out.

On the other hand, we do limit television. Erin has always shown some discretion, but Noah has not. Left to his own devices, he would happily spend eighteen hours a day semi-comatose in front of the set watching programs which would turn him into a drooling zombie. He would refuse meals, bed, even baths. So daytime television is reserved for special occasions. This is one of the few areas where I believe mother knows best. I trust my children to learn, but I do not trust them to distill reasonable values and a sense of balance and perspective from the overwhelming onslaught of popular culture. Not at their ages, not in this age.

Our playroom is our schoolroom. At one end are the stereo, TV, and the dress-up-clothes box. Along an adjacent wall is the piano and the computer desk with the kids' computer. Another wall has a second computer which belongs to the grown-ups in the family, some bookshelves and a large area of panelling which serves as the children's art gallery. The last wall contains the toy cupboard. Up high are things Erin and I occasionally use together: board games like Checkers and Snakes & Ladders, puzzles with lots of pieces, Lego and K'nex. Lower down, but still out of Noah's unaided reach are the Cuisinaire rods and pattern blocks, the art and craft box, the Playdough and magic markers. Below that are the wooden blocks, play dishes, Duplo, and so on, the toys safe for an unsupervised curious 2-year-old. Beside the toy cupboard is a utility table which sometimes gets used for crafts but mostly serves as my sewing centre. There is a big couch in the middle of the room and an old carpet on the floor. This is where we live together, pursuing our activities cooperatively or, more commonly, doing our own things side by side. We like being in this room. We are happy when we are together as a family.

Erin attended nursery school two mornings a week for a while when she was four. This was before we had really decided to homeschool, and we saw it as a useful way to help her separate from the family and prepare for public school. We have a good local program, and although she was a bit shy she managed fine, an sometimes even quite enjoyed it. But she found the fast-paced shifts from one activity to another frustrating, as she was rarely done exploring something when it was time to move on. And the rough, rude and competitive behaviour of the other children often bothered her, even when it wasn't directed at her. Her relationship with her younger brother deteriorated as she spent the afternoons trying on the types of behaviour she'd witnessed in the morning. For a while we thought she just wasn't ready for nursery school, so we left it up to her whether she attended or not. She rarely chose to go, and the less often she went, the happier, more grown-up and self-confident she seemed. Eventually we just had to question why we had her enrolled. So now she learns exclusively outside a classroom, and we like having her home.

She is still a little shy. It's a personality trait, one that she shares with both her parents. Not many people see her dad and me as shy these days, but we were both that way as children. But going to public school had no effect upon our shyness, except perhaps to encourage us to develop inappropriate ways of compensating for it. Erin's shyness is not related to any lack of self-confidence. It's just that in large group situations, she prefers to learn by watching, rather than by doing. In fact, she does quite well in groups of other children these days, at least when there is a diverse mix of ages and interests. About once a month we attend a homeschooling get-together, and she horses around, shrieking and giggling with a throng of a dozen or more three-to-twelve-year-olds. She especially enjoys relating to people one-on-one though, and has a number of friends she sees regularly. Only one of them is close to her age; a few are a year or two younger and many are older, either older children or special adult friends to whom she relates respectfully and with great joy and ease. I like the fact that she can relate to people on various levels, in different types of genuine relationships.

Noah is now happily playing at the kitchen sink. Although he's made some effort to push his sleeves up they are soaking wet, but he doesn't seem to care. He's pouring water from saucepan lids into measuring cups and funnels and strainers. In "eduspeak", he's exploring fluid dynamics and the concept of conservation of mass, testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions. Erin has put some music on the stereo and is dancing around the living room. Is that "phys. ed." or "dramatic arts"?

The kids have just eaten lunch with their dad and he has gone off to work. If we are lucky, he will be home by six and we will have supper and the evening together. On a bad night we might not see him before bedtime. The unpredictability is a trade-off we accept in exchange for having him at home more than we might otherwise. Our income is much smaller than that of most physician-families but we live quite comfortably. We don't take expensive vacations, and we only recently bought a second vehicle. But we have plenty of money for the things we believe are important. I think we have achieved a fortunate balance: we have a reliable source of a income but have managed to learn a little bit of voluntary simplicity before getting caught in a workaholic, acquisitional spiral.

It helps to live far away from the temptations of readily available retail sources. It is a little more difficult to spend money foolishly here. We have lots and lots of catalogues, especially for books, toys and software. We browse a lot and buy a little, and Erin shares our love of catalogues. She has learned how to use an alphabetical index to look things up, and she is getting better at dealing with the numerical estimates and logical algorithms required to find a specific numbered page among a thousand. When she began to show interest in the Sears catalogue last year I had naively wondered what good could possibly come of hours spent looking at photographs of children's clothing and kitchen appliances. Now I see what she has learned.

I had expected that when they were very young, my children would enounter learning at every turn and would greet this learning with passionate excitement. This indeed proved to be the case. I watched them walk and talk and brush their teeth and ride trikes with determination and delight and incredible learning efficiency. I began to think a lot about the seemingly inevitable dwindling of this enthusiasm. I knew it would probably fizzle out over time, and I wondered why.

The more I thought about it, and the more I read, the more it seemed that the status quo of age-stratified, cash-strapped, one-size-fits-all public schooling might be at least partly responsible. I wondered about the segregation of children from society within schools, and the marginalization of children in our culture, where they are important chiefly in their role as consumers, present or future. A hundred and fifty years ago children were first and foremost members of the family and the community. Any formal schooling they did fit secondarily within the context of their importance elsewhere. School might serve as an important adjunct in the life of a child, but it was not its defining element. Nowadays once a child reaches the age of five or six school is what he does and who he is. It seemed to me that at about the time most children enter school, they begin to lose their zeal for seeking out knowledge and skills unbidden. Was this a cause and effect relationship?

A happy set of circumstances conspired to put me in touch with the possibility of homeschooling. Our wonderful diverse community turned out to be the sort place where homeschooling was not regarded as the fringe activity of hippies and religious fanatics. I met several homeschooling families, and I met older homeschooled children who still had their enthusiasm for life and learning. I liked the parents, I liked the way in which they related to their children, and I really liked the children. The luckiest circumstance, though, was probably Erin's birthday. She was born at the very beginning of the year, which meant that she just barely missed the age-cutoff for Kindergarten enrollment the year she was four. We were given an extra year at home, a year in which to "try out" homeschooling. It was like a bonus year, a risk-free trial. We would pretend we were homeschooling, and if it didn't work, we would have lost nothing.

Nothing changed when we began our trial year of homeschooling. We used no curriculum, we made no schedules. We had no routine of daily study, and we did nothing which looked like school. Erin slept in, ate lunch in her pyjamas, fought with her brother, looked at books, played on the computer, danced in the living room, practised her violin, helped me fold laundry and jumped on the furniture. She did regular five-year-old things.

But she was learning! The more I watched, the more I saw. I made an effort to help her capitalize on her own interests but did little more than support her. If she asked a few questions about something, I would suggest the resources she might use to explore it further. We might sit down and read together a bit, do an internet search, or hit the library with a list of research topics. Her excitement about a new baby in the family grew into an incredible knowledge of human embryology and obstetrics. Her interest in a globe we purchased led to a consuming passion for world geography. She wanted to learn to read and attained remarkable fluency almost overnight. And now that she has had experiences in pursuing particular interests, she is beginning to make her own decisions when exploring new areas. She will tell me she needs a book about castles, or a computer program about history, or some coins to practice math. She does much of her learning independently now.

Nothing changed when we began our "homeschooling" year, yet everything changed. There is now no looking back. Our homeschooling experiment is no longer an experiment. It is our way of being a family. The further we travel this road the happier and more confident we become with it, and the less chance there is that Erin will fit well into a public school environment. She knows herself very well now, and she knows when her needs are not being met. She has strong ideas about how she learns best, and she is invariably right about such things. She's academically well ahead of her agemates, and the gap is widening. Things are going so well, we could not possibly risk throwing it all away to try kindergarten next year.

I truly trust my children to learn what they need to learn, and to approach that learning of their own volition, without a fixed external structure. I've been told that this sort of child-led learning requires a real leap of faith. For me it is not a leap. It is an extension of faith. I have the luxury of dealing with children who have never been to school and have never been expected to learn things they were not interested in or not ready for. I had faith that they would learn to walk and talk and use the toilet without being institutionalized under the care of paid coaches, so I see no reason to stop trusting my children's desire to learn just because they reach their fifth birthday. I nurture my faith in them, and they make it easy. They nurture this faith by proving over and over that they deserve it.

Those of us who have been through the public school system are wont to wonder how a child could possibly come to learn the tedious necessities of education without being compelled to do so. It seems impossibly idealistic to expect that children will actually want to memorize the definition of latitude and longitude lines, or their multiplication facts. It seemed impossible to me too, but I am watching it happen. Erin is as interested in learning about these things as she is in learning how to ride a bike or tie her shoes. Children have an incredible drive to make sense of the world around them, and unless they are pushed into learning things in a way that is convenient for someone else, not them, they seem to maintain this drive even when it comes to those areas we adults think of as tedious.

But although I am amazed my what my children choose to learn, I still occasionally need to be reassured that I'm not depriving them of some vital teaching. It is natural, I suppose, for parents to worry frequently whether we are doing all we could for their children. My unschooling philosophy suggests that often the best way to do more is to do less - to resist the urge to guide or direct my children when they do not want my help. But it can be hard to let go of the urge to push, to teach uninvited, to build an artificial formal structure to satisfy my needs and not theirs; I am, after all, a product of the public school system myself. So I have found a wonderful source of support in the form of an on-line e-mail list of Canadian homeschooling parents. Here I am free to learn vicariously from other families' experiments and mistakes, and revel in the reassuring triumphs of other people's children. I am reminded that other wonderful children do awful things from time to time, and that my worries about my children "missing something" are common but unnecessary. The evolution that many families undergo from a structured curricular approach to a more trusting, child-led philosophy is probably an evolution I would have undergone slowly myself over a period of several years. Instead, with the help of my e-mail friends I have been able to reach a comfortable, and, I hope, fairly mature synthesis quite quickly, without a lot of trial and error.

The other direction I reach for support is backwards, back into our own family's brief history of homeschooling. I have always watched my children's learning intently and proudly, and since very early on I have been writing about what I see. I write most exhuberantly when things are going well, or when I've just witnessed an unexpected or welcome transition. Sometimes these writings are simply notes to myself. Sometimes, for fun, I write down what we've been doing using healthy doses of "eduspeak", couching everything in technical learning terms to give it the look of something official and school-ish. Sometimes my writings are part of letters to other parents or friends or family members. Whatever the form, the computer has made it easy to save it all. So when I am worried about what we are (or more likely, are not) doing, I can browse back through all these words and find some very reassuring things which remind me what wonderful, bright, capable learners I have. I can always look back and see the big picture.

We don't seem to have yet encountered too many problems; what we do changes all the time, and so we are not likely to get into a rut. We make an effort to carefully balance any scheduled activities with time spent at home with nothing particular planned. Because we live in a rural area, the scheduled activities the kids have been involved in, like swimming or art lessons, usually involve an hour or more of driving time, so we find that one trip a week is about all we can manage. Generally these activities are daytime programs with other homeschooled children. The contact with other children is great for Erin and Noah, and the informal chatting with other parents counteracts any sense of isolation I might feel. Since we don't have access to a large variety of activities and clubs, we find a variety of things to do around home. We do few of them regularly; rather, we do them when we feel the desire or the need. Some days we definitely need special plans to save us from each other! Our special activities are rarely "canned" kid-activities. A couple of our current favourites are cookie-dates at the local sandwich shop, and picnics in the back of the minivan. It is winter, so we have to be creative.

Today, for instance, is a sandwich-shop day. While we are there, we say hello to the steady trickle of community members who meander through. We see retired schoolteachers, potters, accountants, other parents with toddlers, unemployed handymen and other homeschooling families. All these people recognize my children and stop and say hello. We feel warmly included in our community. Afterwards we walk along the lakeshore together for a few minutes. Erin and Noah play hide and seek. We notice some early signs of spring. We talk and talk and talk with each other. Erin, as usual, dominates the conversation.

When we get home, she disappears to her room for a while. When I check in with her an hour later, she is sitting on the floor surrounded by books, and is browsing through a National Geographic. I casually ask her what she has been reading. She smiles and tells me she hasn't read anything. This is our little joke. She is proud of her reading, but feels uncomfortable when adults, including even myself, draw attention to her abilities. I can imagine the tactics she would use to avoid drawing attention to herself in public school. She would probably fool everyone there. Fortunately, I am in on the joke, and she is okay with this.

There is no doubt she is a bright child. In some ways this makes homeschooling easier. She is an independent learner at a very early age, and we already have early reading and mathematical learning challenges well in hand. On the other hand, by homeschooling her, we are robbing her of the opportunity for virtually assured academic success in the public school environment. And sometimes I am plagued with guilt about enriching her environment, making her brighter and more advanced than she would be without my intervention. Am I trying to hurry my children along an accelerated learning course so that they can get ahead of their peers? Do I feel my kids are too good for the public school system?

I hope not. I have considerable respect for our local public school; given the inherent limitations of public schooling, I think they are doing an admirable job. For families who cannot manage to homeschool, or prefer not to, I think they provide a reasonable option. But I am grateful that we have the option we have chosen. I do not wish to rush my children along a curricular path so that they can finish high school early and prove themselves and our approach superior to public schooling. I don't see education as a linear path at all. In some ways I think schools push children into things too quickly. I want my children to be able to reach their full potential in each phase of their lives. I want them to live as children, not as adults in waiting. Childhood shouldn't be eighteen years spent getting ready to do something else. It is a real part of life. Developmental stages are not milestones to be passed by as quickly as possible, but the building blocks of full personhood. I want to enable my children to grow to their full potential at each developmental stage, without feeling the need to rush ahead to the next stage. My high expectations are for depth and breadth, not velocity.

By mid-afternoon, public school is finished, and that means that my violin students will begin to arrive. They often seem exhausted and poorly focused. These children must try to cram family life, violin lessons and practising, meals, homework, play, and any other extra-curricular activities into a few short hours in the late afternoon and evening. Several of their parents are schoolteachers. I try to be diplomatic: "I realize you have a lot on your plate right now but please try to get a little more practising done before your next lesson." Part of me would like to scream "no wonder you don't have time to do what I ask, you spend all day at school!"

On the two afternoons a week I teach lessons in the basement studio, my children stay upstairs with their grandmother or a homeschooling teenage friend who babysits for us. These relationships are very important to them and they look forward to my teaching days. Erin sometimes comes downstairs and listens to part of a lesson. She is friends with most of my students and is learning violin herself now, so she really enjoys watching. Even better, though, she likes playing with these children after their lessons. Noah, too, has special older friends among my students, and they both love getting the chance to play with these children for a few minutes before or after their lessons. In Erin and Noah's world, it seems most children play the violin. This is a misperception I am happy to encourage.

When I finish teaching and return upstairs, Erin is glowing happily. She has been playing board games with her grandmother and I can tell she has found the afternoon especially enjoyable. "You look happy," I remark. "I'm having a good day," she replies. She seems to know herself quite well. Perhaps all young children do; they simply lack the linguistic tools to put their knowledge into words. I hope she will find it easier to remain true to who she is than many of the young girls I see around town. In some sense I shelter my children in the hope that they will be protected from some of the negative effects of popular culture. I do want them to come to terms with the world at large, but I think that the world ought to be given a PG rating, just like a movie: "parental guidance recommended". I will let my children see this film, but I am going to watch it with them.

Noah is bouncing around rough-housing with one of my violin students who doesn't seem ready to leave quite yet. I am chatting with the student's mom about music and parenting issues and public school and birth order; we are good friends, all of us, and it is a warm, chaotic time. Eventually they drift out the door and I start trying to get supper ready. Usually it is Erin who helps, reading a recipe aloud, measuring the rice, or stirring the soup, but today Noah is the one who pulls a stool over to the counter. Erin is back working on the Duplo museum.

Chuck arrives home from work in good time. After supper, he and Erin play board games for a while. Then she works on the computer, first using a drawing program, and then exploring some human anatomy images. We have one anatomy program designed for 5-9-year-olds and one intended for physicians. She uses both. How much she gets out of the adult program is anyone's guess. We don't test her knowledge. We don't ever intend to do this. We know she can learn. Her motivation to learn is that she wishes to understand the world, not that she wants to please her parents or earn good grades.

All of our children are night-owls, but Erin is especially so. She enjoys the quiet winding-down time she can spend with her parents after the younger two are in bed. She watches the news with her dad. From where I am sitting I can see their two heads, side by side on the couch, brown and blond, big and little. She asks questions about what she sees, and they discuss government and crime and terms like optimism and immigration. I am always impressed with Chuck's explanations to Erin. She asks a lot of tough questions about delicate issues. He is honest and respectful in answering, but still manages to say things in gentle terms a five-year-old can deal with. After the news Erin asks to go to bed. It is too late to read aloud together tonight. Lately we have been missing our read-aloud sessions. I vowed they would not stop when she became an independent reader, but we've been slipping a little. She doesn't seem to be missing them, but I am, and Noah too. Tomorrow I pledge to find a few minutes to read to them.

I take a few minutes for myself to reply to some e-mail. Much of our communication with extended family is by way of e-mail now. We are still in the process of bringing some family members on side with our decision to homeschool. We have said we are "seriously considering it, at least for kindergarten". We know that the proof will be in the pudding, that what is happening with our children will show them that we have made the right decision. We have met no direct opposition, just some gentle concern, and we don't anticipate any difficulty in the long term in defending our homeschooling choice. At times I feel so enthusiastic about it that I want to hurry the process and convince everyone now, but I know that time and gentle persuasion will work much better. Erin is already playing an important role in this persuasion. A slightly mis-spelled e-mail to grandma and a gentle naivete about sex-stereotyped pop culture argue strongly for our case.

The house is very quiet now. The hard drive on the computer whirs. The giant cedar trees outside swish in the breeze. The creek, which will be running hard once spring thaw starts, is just another, more distant hiss. Soon the deep snow will be gone and the outside world will be our classroom too. Erin has plans. She wants to learn about birds this summer. She has taken the bird guide to bed.

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Throughout the winter, Erin has done very little practising, but has still played her violin for pleasure regularly. Several times a week she takes out her instrument and plays a few early review pieces and spends some time improvising. The improvisation is clearly very enjoyable for her. She played for her new baby sister, often just squeaky disorganized notes from the A major scale, the sort of thing an innocent bystander might have rolled eyes over. To me it was fascinating to watch though: although she has not bee interested in "studying" the violin, she was definitely finding joy in this free-form experimentation. I've noticed how her improv pieces are clearly organized around the tonic and dominant, how there are phrase endings with implied cadences, how sequences emerge and meandere and how the complexity of the melody and bowing has grown as the months have passed. Some worrisome posture habits seem to have become entrenched: a droopy violin and a clenched left hand, but any guidance I give in this area was soundly resisted. So I just worry instead.

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We began the fall by establishing a routine of regular weekly lessons with Erin's grandmother. For a few weeks this worked quite well. Erin struggled a little with the bow distribution in Allegretto. Andantino came easily. But the first phrase of Etude arrived about the same time that the novelty of weekly lessons wore off. Lessons began to get silly and passive-aggressive. One week Erin was particularly limp and unco-operative, and her grandmother said "It doesn't look like you're ready for a lesson this week. I think that's all we'll do today. Thank you. Goodbye." I departed for home quickly and efficiently with a very disappointed little girl. Both her grandmother and I had hoped that this experience might make her wake up and realize it was time to start working in a focused fashion. It didn't happen. She was no longer keen to practice. We have a new baby due. Everything is sliding right now.

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Well, we've marked our first anniversary on the violin. We're back from the institute. It was nice to see familiar faces and I was proud of my little Suzuki student. She was so confident and comfortable in the institute environment. She actually volunteered to be the first student to play in her master class on Monday. Because she was the youngest student and a bit introverted, she didn't rush around making friends, but she got along well with the other children and really enjoyed watching them. What interested me most was who Erin chose as a role-model: one of the Book 3 students, not the oldest or most advanced student, but clearly the student with the most outstanding combination of musicality, proficiency, and dedication to the violin, and that look of complete comfort on the instrument. Even the littlest students can be very discerning in their choice of heros.

Erin seemed to often reside on another planet during group classes. I would have to remind myself that she's not attending school yet, and she almost never gets group lesson experience, so she is a novice in the classroom. But I didn't really expect her to be the one child standing blankly in playing position in the middle of the room every time the rest of the students had promptly followed instructions and sat down or got into rest position or gone back to sit with their parents or whatever. The only thing which prevented me from stage-whispering intense commands to her from the sidelines during these moments was my previous teacher-training courses, where we had been encouraged to observe and critique parents' counter-productive behaviours in just such situations. I had to work consciously at just letting her be out there, in her own little world, comfortable and happy, but not terribly connected to reality at times!

Now I am worrying about the case of post-institute let-down which we experienced last year. Erin's Grandma/teacher is away for the next couple of weeks, so I am working extra hard to keep a bit of momentum going until then. I am baiting her with preparation exercises for G-major and upcoming pieces in the hope that we can keep her inspiring institute memories alive: she watched a couple of children in her master class working on Andantino and on the low-2 finger position. And I think I will start playing the Book 3 recording regularly, since I want her to keep thinking about the girl who played those pieces so beautifully. I notice that Erin has started rocking her body a little as she plays legato pieces, just the way Brynne did at the recital.

Happy First Violin Anniversary, Erin!

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My little performer performed a beautiful Twinkle Theme at our spring recital last week. Her first recital, a "Twinkle Graduation". She was very pleased with herself.

She is now working on Perpetual Motion. A lot has happened in the past couple of months. She has been teaching herself new pieces. The power of repetitive listening! Those hundreds of hours of Book 1 in the background have done the trick. She plays in tune and can "figure out" new pieces. I show her the bowing tricks and so on. But she learns the notes herself, always correctly.

Her grandma and grandpa have retired to our little corner of the earth, and grandma has agreed to teach Erin the violin. So am the "home teacher", and grandma is the "Wednesday teacher". This has helped us a lot. Erin is far more willing to do detail work on finger independance and bow distribution and posture remediation if the instructions come from her grandma. She is working hard, sometimes almost an hour of playing over the course of the day.

She has learned to revel in her comfort zone, and I've learned to let her. She plays her "review pieces" sometimes four or five times each when practising. This "playing through" takes up to ninety percent of her practising time. I am often tempted to correct posture or remind her to watch her bow during review time, but I keep my mouth shut. Reviewing her earlier repertoire is her reward and her motivator. It's what makes her feel wonderful. She can do it well, and it's so EASY now. I wonder if this will last. Or will she become like so many other students: will she tire of her old repertoire eventually, then begin to forget it, then learn to dislike it because it has become difficult to play well? Perhaps, but I will try to prevent this from happening. Right now we are aided by her developmental stage: preschoolers love repetition!

Last week we were fortunate to be able to attend a one-day workshop with a guest teacher in a nearby village. It was Erin's first chance to play her new post-Twinkle repertoire in a group. She stood up and played it all. I was delighted. She was so painfully shy and reluctant in group situations a year ago, it was a treat to see her full of confidence and looking so capable and proud. And she worked with the teacher in the private lesson / master class as well, trying some new things that she'd never done before. And this despite the fact that I had to be out of the room trying to control her very enthusiastic younger brother for much of the lesson-time. (Noah will be two this fall. He wants his own violin. He wants it now.)

Can't wait for the institute. There is lots of hard work ahead in mid-Book 1: fourth fingers, a new second finger position, longer more complex pieces, new musical styles, slurs and so on. It will help to get a good dose of peer-motivation before hitting these challenges.

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I keep expecting the bubble to burst. We have been rollicking along for almost four months now. The routine is established, progress is occurring, and the progress is serving as motivation. I am amazed. It really seems to be working.

It took Erin about a month to learn Lightly Row. We are now working on Song of the Wind, the next piece. When I think back, I realize we spent about fifteen months on bow-hold and rhythmic awareness, eight months on the first piece, and one month on the second piece. Tangible progress happens day by day now, and she is now aware of the progress without me needing to remind her: "when you were three you couldn't do that!"

We still miss the group exposure. She's been able to attend two regional group classes this year, and even this little bit helps. I think we will go to the institute again this year. She is much more confident and outgoing than she was last year, and I think she will get even more out of the experience this summer.

She's turned into quite a little performer. She will pull out her violin and play a quick concert for anyone who will sit still long enough for a Twinkle. She played this week for her nursery school class. "Wow!" said the teacher. "How long did it take her to learn that?" "About two years", I replied, with a laugh. A happy laugh.

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We've moved up to a sixteenth-size violin. The tailpiece on the thirty-second-size cracked, and it has proved impossible to find a replacement. I had a nice sixteenth sitting around waiting for her, so we've switched. It's a little too big still, but she is in LOVE with the tone. It sounds so huge and robust compared to the old one.

The Twinkles are pretty secure now. We lost track with our Twinkle-counting somewhere beyond a hundred. We had run out of KinderSurprises, and I mentioned to Erin when we were out shopping that we should get some more. She said not to bother, she's didn't want them any more. Not want a chocolate egg with a toy inside?! We don't seem to need the stickers or the Loonies any more either. Success is its own motivator!

I think it's almost time to move on. We still have some trouble with a droopy violin and a left hand that grips the neck of the violin. But I think she's a Twinkler now, rather than a pre-Twinkler, so next week we will start working on the E - C-sharp pattern that begins Lightly Row, the next piece.

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I'm wondering where we went so wrong last fall. I didn't appreciate how hard it would be to get a home routine established, and I guess I just wasn't committed to it: in the back of my head I kept thinking, "well, she's still only three-and-a-half..." And I think I questioned my own motivation behind starting her so young. Did I want her to be some SuperKid? And part of me still believed that I could magically get her all fired up and wanting to do it desperately. Maybe some kids are like that: I think it's more likely in families where there hasn't always been a violin around, where there's that novelty effect of something brand-new and hitherto out of reach. For whatever reason, with Erin it wasn't like that.

But she's increasingly motivated now that we're practising every day and she sees her progress. She is the initiator of our practice sessions as often as not these past couple of weeks, and although we do not practice for long or terribly efficiently, I am delighted and relieved that we now have a happy routine.

I have begun using a number of gimmicks. She gets $1 a week for practising and making her bed every day. It goes into her piggy bank, and I don't think she has any idea what it's for, but it seems to make her happy. We practice in my basement teaching room, rather than in the "living" part of the house, so she feels special and grown up like my older students.

I am blessed with a camcorder, and we have started videotaping her practising each Sunday, as a sort of "lesson". We mail the tape to grandma on Mondays and will probably get some feedback, but the most important thing is that it gives us a weekly goal. We use stickers sometimes, and even KinderSurprises (one KS for every ten twinkles). Yes, we are doing Twinkles all the way through, now. Labouriously slowly, but she seems to have the concentration to get all the way through. So we are keeping track. Thirty five and counting.

I am really glad that I finally pushed ahead with this violin thing again. We are learning lots about each other, she is gaining confidence and maturity. Oddly enough, she has decided that she should also practice reading and math every day. The other day we had to do sums in the bathroom while getting ready for bed because we'd forgotten to do them earlier! So it seems she is learning a lot about what learning is all about.

Erin's Violin Blog 7

We are developing quite a routine the past week or two! We are finally, for about the first time ever, managing to practise more than once or twice a week. We have had a dismal fall and winter on the violin, but are, I think, finally hitting our stride. We are working through lots of autonomy issues. Her growing maturity has meant that we are able to talk about our problems, and this has made a difference. I am amazed by how well she understands her own feelings, even when she needs some help verbalizing them . And we are working out ways of helping her to communicate her feelings to me, rather than just shutting down, which is her natural inclination. It is incredibly hard work for me, but I think we are beginning to make some progress. We are doing nothing more with the instrument than what we were doing last summer: technique-wise we have stepped way back, but this is definitely the right direction to be going for now.

She is desperately in need of a peer group, though. Last week we heard her grandma interviewed on national radio after Dr. Suzuki's death. A young student had accompanied her to the studio and played a stellar version of Boccherini's Minuet at the end of Book 2. You would not believe how turned on Erin was by hearing Chloe's voice and violin on the radio. We taped the interview and Erin has wanted to hear it several times since.

The other day we were faithfully practising together on open strings. She was bowing, and I was using my finger on her finger-board to make the F-sharp after an open A and an open E rhythm. Suddenly she decided she could do that, and up went the hand and she took over. So we are back to using fingers! I didn't ask her to try it at all. She just decided it was time. I'm glad the initiative was hers. She is very pleased, and now wants to start working with the other fingers again.