Viola shift

That's an old photo, from 2005. Noah got his first Sabatier viola about a year before this photo was taken. He's since outgrown that 1/4-size instrument and recently has outgrown the replacement 1/2-size. His 3/4-size (13") will arrive within a week or so.

He's also getting a new teacher. Sort of. He and T (in the photo) have had something of an ongoing teacher-student relationship since the summer this photo was taken. They've had at least a few lessons every year. She lives in Calgary and is one of the teachers Erin studies violin with. (Violin and viola are pretty similar technique-wise, but the more advanced you get the more the repertoire diverges on the two instruments. T knows a lot of the advanced violin repertoire, so she's fine with teaching Erin the pieces she knows well, at least for now. T & her husband J, a violinist, team-teach Erin.) But now that Noah is outstripping his grandmother (a violinist who hasn't studied viola as well) in learning the viola repertoire, it seemed like a good time to shift the primary directing of his studies to a violist we're visiting every month anyway.

Since T is in town for all the local summer music school stuff, we're putting the two of them together a few times so that they can build a foundation for ongoing less frequent work together in the fall and onwards. Even though they know each other pretty well, every year Noah is a year older. Funny how that happens. It means that when they do work together they kind of have to shuffle around a little to find where to meet in terms of challenge and expectations. Sometimes they don't quite meet up at a first pass.

Case in point. Last week they had a brief lesson together. Somehow in the space of about 25 minutes they worked on three brand-new challenging bowing techniques: richochet, collé and sautillé (string players will be nodding, wide-eyed, at this point -- it's a huge amount of technique). All three have potential application in one of the Beethoven Dances Noah has just learned, and it was a very productive lesson I thought, given the time constraints. Lots of enticing new things to experiment with over the weekend, and the promise of more lesson-time this week to follow up on this stuff. Noah was really happy about the lesson.

But the next day he got extremely frustrated during his practicing. Somehow he had got it in his head that these bowing techniques, each of which typically takes an intermediate-advanced student months to master, should be learned immediately. He and I had a talk about it, and I reassured him that this was a slow gradual process. He seemed happier. The next day he was thrilled that his sautillé worked for 3 or 4 seconds on an open string note. The following day he reported that his ricochet was getting easier as he stiffened his bowhand a little. His expectations now seemed more realistic and he was happier.

Today was his next lesson. T asked him to play his Beethoven Country Dance to start out. He'd picked the tempo up to what she'd suggested and had clearly done some excellent work on it. But he struggled with the advanced bowing techniques; they weren't nearly ready to be inserted confidently into the piece and suddenly his realistic expectations were out the window. He was upset, really upset, that he hadn't mastered all three techniques to the point that they were easy and flexible and usable in his repertoire at performance tempo.

It was a case of his perfectionism and high standards not being held in check with an explicit enough declaration of expectations. If T had said "don't worry about the new bowing technique -- just play the piece," he probably would have been fine. Or "try the ricochet if you like; I know it's a bit of a gamble at this point -- no big deal." But as it was he decided as he played that she would only be satisfied or pleased if he nailed it all. And he didn't. And he veered perceptibly close to tears.

T reassured him that this was all just optional stuff for the Beethoven, and of course he wouldn't have it all down pat in four days. They moved on. Noah's feelings seem to recover. They moved on to start work on a new Brahms piece (Hungarian Dance #5) and did some really good work on it.

This evening I chatted with T about how Noah's lesson had gone. She said how badly she felt about how she'd handled the bowing stuff in the Beethoven and how sorry she was about upsetting him ... and she hoped he would be able to feel okay about her and about the viola.

This evening I also chatted with Noah about how his lesson had gone. He said it was "totally the awesome-est!" and that he'd come home and practiced yet again, for the third time today, and had tons of fun trying out the ideas he'd been given.

Aren't kids funny? You just can never tell what they'll take home from an experience. Noah's feelings are sometimes strong and close to the surface -- but as quickly as they're out there, they're dealt with and he's moved on. And there's still plenty of time in an hour to have "totally the awesome-est" lesson ever.

It's clear, I think, that the shift in primary viola teacher is going to work beautifully. Noah's a resilient, hard-working kid who takes his music very seriously. I can't imagine a better teacher for him. And I think the two of them will work through any bumps along the road just fine. I think they'll probably find a flow and a set of expectations that will work for both of them. In between monthly-ish lessons with T, Noah will still have his grandma available to help him structure and guide his practicing.

Somehow we just have to entice J & T to move to our area. Then everything would be perfect.

Jovano Jovanke

I'm not quite sure how this took shape. Two of the students (one being my eldest) had performed this at another institute with the ringleader-faculty-member. They decided between them that there should be a Valhalla version as well. So they conned, coerced, encouraged and brokered deals to get a couple of other students and a bunch of faculty members playing too. They performed it as an "entr'acte" between the cello and violin performances at the final concert. Amidst all the chair-shuffling, chaos and noise, they had a lot of fun. My first try at rendering this produced a lot of distortion from the tambourine; I think this version is a bit better.

There it is -- gone!

Finally! It was too late in the evening to call her two favourite [adult] friends to let them know, but you can bet we'll be hurrying around in the morning to show off the hole where Fiona's first missing tooth used to be. I've never seen a kid so happy-excited to see her own blood as this one was when she realized she'd knocked the thing looser yet and it was now only hanging by a thread. It didn't take long after that.

The other big news in Fiona's life today is that we've secured her a piano teacher. She's been waiting for this for almost a year. She'll be studying with Erin's piano teacher. I expect she'll do well with this teacher's approach, as she's already reading music reasonably well on violin. She starts in October. Perhaps she'll have lost another tooth by then.

Full moon alpine hike

It's not very often that the full moon falls on the one day between two music school weeks when we actually have time to go out and take advantage of it. There's this amazing famous alpine hike a few miles from where we live. You can drive up and up a hair-raisingly-precipitous logging road to a parking pull-out in the alpine and from there take a short easy 45-minute hike to the highest peak in the region. At the top you are ringed by all the other high peaks and ridges. It's an amazing 360-degree view, with the lake visible way way down below. For reasons that aren't clear, it's called Idaho Peak. Perhaps you can see Idaho from the top -- it's less than 90 miles, after all. It's the hike to do in the area. You always ask the tourists whether they've "been up Idaho yet." The snow is gone from early July to early September, and the alpine wildflowers peak in early August.

We've been up half a dozen times. The drive is not to be taken lightly, so it's not a trip we do every year. It had been four years since we last went, and yesterday I decided that the time had come to do a night hike in the full moon.

As it turned out Noah had a nasty cold and didn't feel up to going, so he and I stayed home. Chuck took the girls, which was convenient, because our 4WD vehicle only seats four (the van has ground clearance so low as to be problematic on this drive). They took a flashlight, but they didn't use it because the moon was so bright. And they didn't take a tripod, as you can see from the photo above, but the obligatory photos at the peak were taken anyway. The temperature was perfect and it was sooooo quiet up there. They arrived home exhilarated three hours later.

SVI Photos

Orchestra in action. This year the senior students did chamber music but also participated in Orchestra 2. They loved the fuller slate of daily music programming, and the other orchestra kids appreciated the leadership and added 'oomph' of the senior students.

A wonderful silly breaking-the-ice game at Music & Movement class. Based on cards handed out, participants had to scramble to form "family portraits" as quickly as possible. This family has luckily ended up with Fiona being the Baby on Grandma's lap. As often as not the sizes were reversed, leading to much hilarity.

The Flawless Four in rehearsal. I believe that they were Flawless by Tuesday, so I'm not sure what they were rehearsing in this Thursday photo. They must have just been entertaining their coach with another perfect performance.

More orchestra. Erin, Noah and Sophie were all in the same orchestra, and you can see them in a line here. Noah (orange shirt & glasses) is closest to the camera, Erin's head is immediately above his, and Sophie is a little above and behind Erin.

Fiona's master class. She worked on left hand dexterity for trills, and on left thumb relaxation. She's such a focused, responsive kid in master classes -- it's easy to forget she's only five. These two had a really nice rapport all week long.

I mentioned the string games before. They really took over. Every day the kids learned more and the knowledge was viral. By week's end kids were sharing tricks and games and strings with anyone they met.


Lots of red shirts on the merry-go-round. The two playgrounds adjacent to the school were great for burning off energy and making friends. What a nice bunch of kids!

Family Dance was Tuesday night. It was massive. Almost a hundred and fifty participants. Everyone had a blast. Because the kids had had two Music & Movement classes already by then, many had learned some of the dances. It was time to share them with the older kids, siblings, faculty and other parents. Enthusiasm was infectious. There's something about adults dancing with five-year-olds they've never met, and passing them on around a huge circle, that makes everyone happy.

The ice cream social. Our faculty were pretty happy most of the time I think, but especially with ice cream in hand.


This is where it all happened, and this is the weather we had the whole time. Glorious clear skies and sun, hot enough for multiple trips to Fat Kat's for ice cream and for swimming in the lake but the non-air-conditioned venues stayed at a comfortable temperature even through the afternoons.

Breathing space

Look at what my half-a-terabyte new hard drive has done to relieve my old C: drive of its overload. I moved My Documents over to my new drive and life's good here again. I can download photos off my camera and get new podcasts for my iPod. My computer is much happier. It's still a bit of a dinosaur in terms of processing speed and all that, but it has the Windows memory it needs to open Firefox without me needing to take a coffee break while it does its stuff.

Pink hard drive is a good thing. Photos to follow.

Shoe-guy piano quintet

Erin received her violin part for her string quartet in Edmonton & Montreal and her piano part for her piano quintet back home here for the VSSM the same week. The former was a Schubert piece, the latter a Schumann work. So we talked about the Shoe-guys she was playing this summer. Because she was on her own in Edmonton and Montreal I don't have a video of the quartet performances. But tonight, after being corralled as a page-turner for my kid, I handed the video camera off to Chuck and he recorded the Schumann.

It was a dynamite chamber group she was in this week. At the first rehearsal on Monday when she saw the 1st violinist's cue for the downbeat she realized "holy ___, this is going to be fast!" and her eyes lit up and her adrenaline started pumping and her fingers started their happy fast dance across the keys. She'd been working on the music as the situation allowed for the month or so prior (a challenge given that she was in the midst of scores of hours of string music programming away from home), but she didn't realize who was going to be in the ensemble. When she arrived and saw that these were the students who had been at the top end of the VSSM a year or two ago, it was clear she'd been placed in a rather different league. She ramped up the tempo and thrilled at the challenge.

I think she did a phenomenal job. I hadn't heard any of the rehearsals, so I was as awed and thrilled as everyone else at the performance. And I was right in the thick of it, turning pages, wondering how this kid of mine could possibly be playing all those notes! I am not a pianist, which increases my awe many-fold.

The choral bug

After Erin's Community Choir performance last spring, Noah piped up on the drive home "I think I'd like to sing in a choir like that some day." He'd spent a year in a children's choir in Nelson, and a year in the offshoot boys' choir, until the choral program had evolved into something different on a different day with a different director. But he was making a very bold (and brave, for him!) statement about his dreams and ambitions. Erin immediately launched into a mock rant about how Noah was in no way allowed to join HER choir, at least until his voice had changed and he could be relegated to the far male end of the choir from the first sopranos. Thankfully Noah didn't take her too seriously, and so when I suggested he might sign up for the summer VSSM Adult Choir with Erin, he jumped at the chance. The VSSM Adult Choir is made up of many of the same community members as comprise the regular-season Community Choir. There's a different director and a more intensive 90-minutes-a-day, every day, rehearsal schedule. But otherwise it's your standard 40-voice four-part choir and I thought it'd be a nice challenge for Noah.

He loved it. The 1st violinist from his regular string quartet was also in the choir, and he, Erin and D. had a lovely time. They learned the music well and sang brilliantly. Noah is now vying for the chance to join the Community Choir. Erin is okay with the idea, but we're not sure if they'll have him. He's very young. Even Erin was almost-13 when she first joined, and very much an adolescent and someone who had always naturally gravitated to adults in a social milieu. D. will be the other under-30 person in the choir this year -- but she's 13, a teenager. Noah is still an 11-year-old pre-adolescent kid and while the director knows he'd do just fine, to have someone his age join might set an awkward precedent. So we're not sure whether they'll have him or not. Fingers crossed. If not, maybe by next year.

Erin will also be doing the teen choir in Nelson. She's thrilled. I think we've managed to rearrange our weekly schedule to make this possible. Shifted orchestra to Wednesday, rearranged all the kids' violin and piano lessons, shifted all my mom's out-of-town students to different days so that they can still participate in orchestra.

And Sophie and Fiona and their mom loved singing in Family Choir. It's been a wonderful week, chorally speaking. Largely thanks to Allison, the VSSM choral director, who also directs the Corazon ensemble Erin is joining.

On gaps

We're still waiting for Fiona's first dental gap to appear. She has a very wiggly lower incisor that she is determined will fall out before the Olympics are over. I'm not sure why this time-line is important to her, but she's shooting for it anyway.

This post is about a different type of gap, the kind that happens when you blissfully ignore the curriculum outcomes by grade and allow your children to learn by way of curiosity, passion and serendipity. When you don't teach your Grade 5 kid all about Canada's pioneers and the solar system, instead allowing him to delve deeply into the history of science, physical and organic chemistry, ancient worlds and the origin of man. I wrote this on a message board in response to a parent who was asking "What if your homeschooled child ends up entering the school system at some point? What do you do to ensure he doesn't have serious gaps?"

When you read those scary studies about what school students actually know (like that 60% of American high schoolers can't find Japan on a world map) you start to appreciate that most of what is taught at school is not actually learned in any permanent meaningful way. There may be all sorts of impressive things on the curriculum outline, but only a portion of that is actually taught by the teacher, only a portion of what's taught is actually absorbed long enough to produce an acceptable unit-end test result, and most of that which is regurgitated on the test is not retained for longer than a few weeks at most. So to my mind it makes absolutely no sense to fuss with "what they're supposed to be learning" according to the school curriculum outcomes. If my kids only learn 80%, or 50%, or even 30% of what's on the Grade 5 science and social studies school curriculum, but they truly learn it because it's stuff that has meaning for them and is motivated by their own interests, they'll probably be farther ahead in the long run, with fewer 'gaps' than kids who supposedly covered it all in Grade 5 but then had most of that learning fall out of their heads after the chapter tests.

A very small celebration

Yesterday Fiona made brownies. Today she decided to use her allotted brownie to celebrate the fact that she gets to start the Dark Green math book. We stuck a candle in it and called it breakfast, since she'd finished the last review exercise in the old book right after rolling out of bed. After getting all sugared up, she dived right into the new book. That was the best reward of all for finishing her first math book -- more math!

(For the record I should say that I don't really believe in early academics. But this particular kid is so enthusiastic, easy-going and joyful in her pursuit of academic skills that I've had to bend to her way of doing things, and I don't really worry about it. After all, it's about her, not me.)

This week is a lot about Erin and Noah, because of their more extensive music program involvement. So it's nice to have a little moment at home to put the focus on Fiona and what she's doing. Now, where is Sophie .... ?

A pocket-sized institute

This was the Suzuki Valhalla Institute. Eight cello students, three viola students, 70 or so violin students. Pre-Twinklers to post-book-10 level. Two orchestras, three string quartets, a couple of reading ensembles, half a dozen group classes a day. An intimate master class for every child every day. Twelve amazing faculty with wide-ranging skills and interests. And the most amazing group of parents -- friendly, caring, flexible, helpful, understanding. Suzuki families, like homeschooling families, are a select bunch. The parents have made a big commitment to being actively involved in their children's learning and holistic growth over the long term. And that means that in the space of just five and a half days an incredible sense of community can spring up.

We didn't get quite everyone for the group photo. I think about an a quarter of the students and parents are missing. But it's still a great representation of the size and the good cheer. I've been to lots of big institutes, and a few small ones. There are advantages to both. This is the loveliest small one I've ever been a part of, though. And I'm not biased!

VSSM back and forth

While the SVI is circumscribed within the local K-12 public school, the VSSM week currently taking place is a metastatic entity infiltrating two adjacent villages. It is almost three times as big, with string players, pianists and choristers, adult amateurs, music appreciation enthusiasts and young children looking for a first exposure to musical activities. Lessons take place in the school, the nursing home activity room, a variety of community halls and buildings, private homes, vacant storefronts, a firehall, churches and a dental clinic. You may be wondering what becomes of the dentist during the VSSM week. He takes the week off of dentistry and instead drives the courtesy shuttle bus back and forth between the two villages. Everything here is transformed for the week. Music pours out of open doors everywhere.

Erin is enrolled as a piano student during the VSSM week. She'd really rather have focused on violin, but at VSSM for a variety of reasons the piano program is a better fit for her. And it's really her only opportunity to put the primary focus on her 'second instrument.' This year she opted to do chamber music on piano rather than picking up her violin in the afternoon to do orchestra. It turned out to be a lucky choice -- she's been placed in the most advanced piano chamber group with a bunch of very advanced string students and is being coached by some pretty dynamite Winnipegers. She's doing a full six-hour a day program which includes 90 minutes of Adult Choir. Fiona, Sophie and I are just singing in Family Choir -- no string stuff at all for us. Noah opted to sing in the Adult Choir, his first foray into sort-of-sight-singing and four-part arrangements. (I say 'sort of' because the director does help the weaker readers by giving some by-ear help.) He's loving that. And he's also managing to squeeze in private coaching on viola and is doing the "lower advanced" orchestra, playing the Holst "St. Paul's Suite."

All of which means a lot of back-and-forthing. Today, for example, went like this. New Denver at 9, then home. New Denver at 12, then home. Silverton at 12:50, and New Denver at 1:00, the back to Silverton at 2:30, back to New Denver at 2:40, then home. Silverton at 3:45. Home at 4:30. Silverton again at 5:00 and home again. Silverton again at 6:30 pm and home one last time. We opted to give the 7 pm concert in Silverton a miss tonight, after going to last night's. In between driving back and forth I cooked meals, made bag lunches, dealt with the garden and the animals and pulled noxious weeds. The usual stuff.

Is it worth it? After the SVI week the VSSM often seems a bit too chaotic and impersonal for our liking. If we had to go away and pay lots of money to do it we would just stick with the SVI. But here are all these great players and teachers in the midst of our tiny rural villages, and so we can treat it as a smorgasbord and simply pick and choose the classes and teachers that suit us. We don't have to do the full-meal deal. And even considering the taxiing back and forth, it works really well for us.

For instance, Erin's having a heck of a week. Tomorrow she's being coached as a pianist in her chamber quintet by the concertmaster of the Winnipeg Symphony alongside some phenomenal young string players. And about an hour later she's having a violin lesson from the same woman. The advanced piano teacher / coach (the aforementioned violinist's husband) has apparently been quite impressed with her so far this week. And today she was invited into an amazing teen choir based out of Nelson by the director of the Adult Choir. Invited isn't exactly the word. Erin confessed an interest and Allison seemed almost in raptures that she'd be willing to come all that way to sing with them. ("Gone for two months right before the spring tour? Don't worry ... we'll find a way to make it work!")

Erin's life seems rather charmed lately for reasons I don't entirely understand. Don't get me wrong -- I love her dearly and think she's amazing. But I'm stunned that so many other people feel the same way about her when she's so reserved and seemingly difficult to get to know. But people seem to like her ... and these days she seems to actually like people back. She's looking for challenge and adventure and it seems to be finding her.

Csardas

The senior repertory class at SVI is small, as is the whole institute (80 students), so we have a range of ages and levels and the violins and violas are combined. This year they spent half of each hour-long class working on this very fun composition by Michael MacLean, his "Csardas." They had a lot of fun, in large part because it's such a fun piece. Erin is second from the left, Noah is second from the right, and Sophie is the tiny little thing more or less in the middle. Enjoy!

The Flawless Four

I was a little apprehensive about Noah's quartet placement at the SVI. Due to a dearth of violists he was the most experienced chamber music player enrolled this year on viola. When we needed someone to put in a quartet with his vastly capable older sister and another dynamite young violinist, there was really no more logical choice than Noah. I thought, though, that he might be intimidated and lacking in confidence. I turns out I needn't have worried. The quartet, though not ideally matched on paper in terms of levels, experience and maturity, was beautifully cohesive in reality. Noah's musicality, Erin's experience, Nicole's sensitivity and confidence and Nick's all-round balance of good humour and work ethic made for an ensemble that, it was clear from day one, was going to be impressive. Five hours of rehearsing later we ended up with four kids calling themselves "The Flawless Four."

They were set up in a very 'open' configuration for performance due to the constraints of the stage, playing more or less in a row rather than a cluster. The result was that Noah's hard-won habit of communicating visually with his quartet-mates ended up involving a lot of rubber-necking. Watch his head during the last few chords .... oh my, we laughed when we noticed that on the video.

Black bear in a cherry tree

Bears are a fact of life where we live. Black bears mostly; grizzlies thankfully stay in the alpine. Once the cherries are ripe, and until the last of the frost-ripened apples are gone, bears are simply part of the fabric of rural life. We don't see them every day, but often for stretches of several days in a row there will be a bear or two in the neighbourhood, and that typically happens several times over the course of late summer and fall.

The Suzuki Valhalla Institute venue is in a lovely area in the centre of town. Classes are held in the local K-12 school. Parents and children practice outside beneath trees, children roam freely to and from the playgrounds at either end of the school, wander over to Fat Kat's to buy themselves ice cream cones, or down the little hill through the orchard area to Nuru for Italian sodas.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, 'bears in the neighbourhood' meant the neighbourhood that surrounds the Suzuki Valhalla Institute venue, during the actual institute week itself. There was a 2- or 3-year-old black bear chowing down in the cherry trees directly across from the school. Maybe 40 or 50 metres from the lobby, beside the laneway to Nuru, right next to where everyone parks and unloads their children and instruments.

So we put up a sign. "Bear in area. Parents please supervise your children." We encouraged children to walk to and from the playgrounds only on the sidewalk directly in front of the school building. Most of the institute participants were able to see the bear and enjoy watching him for a few minutes. The main concern was a few folk from cities who were desperate to get too close and take photos, but they were easily redirected. Mostly people stayed back and watched respectfully. A few people asked whether the Wildlife Officer should be called. Locals chuckled and said no. Here we only call about Problem Bears, and just being in a cherry tree enjoying an extended dessert is not a Problem.

One young child came out of his 2 pm class and read the warning sign in the lobby of the school.

"Look mom!" he exclaimed. "It says 'bear in area, parents please surprise your children!'"

The bear was there for most of the afternoon. It was quite the event for many of our institute participants. When we headed out to the community hall for our final concerts in the late afternoon he was still there.

The performances were stunning. The quartet Erin and Noah were in (photo above) did a phenomenal job. Video to follow, I hope.

So finally we understand the significance of this year's T-shirt colours ... black bear in a cherry tree.

Observing for learning

My younger kids are enrolled with a wonderful Distributed Learning program (DL) through an independent school here in BC. This is a government-funded program which provides support (financial and otherwise) in exchange for reporting. Once a week for 34 weeks a year we submit an anecdotal report called "Observing for Learning" or O4L. Noah often contributes some of the content of his report. Sophie hasn't begun to do so yet. The idea is to report not on what was done but on what was meaningful to the children. Our particular DL is wonderfully holistic and unschooling-minded, and they don't want to just hear "did lessons 17-19 in Singapore Math 3B." They want to gradually develop a picture of why and how different types of learning are occurring and how the child feels about them -- and how they are relevant in terms of overall growth of the child.

While it's difficult to give a good portrayal of the reporting style with a snapshot, I thought I'd pull a random O4L from the archives and share it here for the heck of it. People are always asking me what O4L's are like and maybe this will help them understand.

First, a proviso. Most of the time I actually like writing O4Ls because they are a chance for me to reflect on what's going on, to celebrate changes and progress, and to create a sort of virtual memory book of my kids' learning. So I tend to write very thorough reports, more than most parents write. My impression is that most parents write about half this much. (If any of you are lurking, please feel free to comment on this!) So if you're a prospective SelfDesign parent and can't envision doing reports this lengthy, do not be scared away. I think I probably go way overboard.

Sophie finally finished knitting one of her mittens. The thumb, with its fiddly four-needle knitting, had been waiting to get finished for ages. She's since cast on the second mitten. She's also started a little purse for herself and is adapting a pattern in a knitting book (using stocking stitch rather than garter stitch).

We arrived early at aikido this week because Fiona wanted to watch the little kids' class that precedes Noah's & Sophie's (which she loved and joined on the spot). When the sensei needed an assistant for a game, she asked Sophie to help out, which she did quite comfortably and confidently.

Sophie and Noah both did very well and enjoyed themselves a lot in their own class. They were extremely focused, which is something the rest of the class is working on. Sophie commented afterwards that it's good to have at least two people in your family doing Aikido, so that you can practice the attack/defence movements at home with a partner. Noah said he likes how much thinking there is in Aikido. They both seem to be learning a lot about how they learn and where their strengths and comfort zones lie. I am particularly enamoured of how competitiveness is handled by the two sensei; it seems totally consistent with what we do at home and my kids are comfortable with it.

At home after aikido this week, the gym mats came down from the loft. Since the living part of our house is concrete slab floors with just a thin layer of no-underlay grotty carpet, no one would want to go ka-thunk-flop on them as-is. But with the mats practicing aikido is terrific fun. They are thrilled to have them. They've been working like crazy on their rolls, helping each other, coaching Fiona, refining their skills, and the mats have made all the difference.

The kids' aunt in Winnipeg, who is a Suzuki violin teacher herself, needed some help figuring out how to do internet video-conferencing, as she's trying to help teach a bunch of kids in the Yukon at a distance. So we reinstalled our webcam, fired up a Skype account and rang her up. The kids had a hoot waving, talking and being goofy. We were specifically wanting to test how well it would work for music, so Anna asked if they would play their instruments. Sophie was happy to play a Bach Gavotte from the beginning of Suzuki Book 5 and did a nice clean job. (The image quality is of course quite poor, but with good-quality mikes we could actually get pretty decent sound.)

Aikido has got the kids interested in Japanese again. They need to learn to say a few short greeting phrases, to count to ten or twenty and to recognize the meanings of words for certain moves, stances and body parts. Sophie has been enthusiastically counting and revisiting kana and a few kanji.

I had bought two sets of Professor Noggin trivia cards a couple of months ago to help deal with boredom during long van trips. This week's trip to Calgary was the trip when they seemed to catch the kids' interests. We had the Science set, which the kids did very well on. They only missed a very few of the hardest questions the first time around ... and they correctly noticed two errors! And their mistaken answers were 100% correct the second time around. There were plenty of offshoot discussions and all told I think the kids spent about three hours with these cards.

The other set was Canadian History, something we've barely touched on in the past three or four years. Before we left home for Calgary there was a general consensus from the kids that "we know a lot about general history, especially ancient history, but not enough about Canadian." We had Pierre Berton's set of books for middle-schoolers sitting on our bookshelf so I pulled them out and they picked the "Canada Moves West" set to start with. I grabbed the first one to take with us to Calgary. I read the first half of it while we were on our trip and it turned out to be a great coincidence that this book was about surveying BC for the CPR, and tons of the places and people being discussed were part of the geography we were driving through. The whole beginning of the book was about Walter Moberly, whom I'd never heard of ... and while we were driving through Golden we saw signs to Moberly Mtn, and Moberly Bench Road and the Blaeberry River and all these places that were in the book. And trains chugged by our motel and our minivan the whole trip.

The kids didn't do very well with the Canadian history Prof. Noggin cards, though they memorized a lot of the answers. It's very neat to have the interest in filling some gaps coming from them. We have a lot of resources (Erin went through a fair bit of Canadian history when she was about Sophie's age) and I was just waiting for some interest. We'll see where this goes...

Imaginations run wild in the van during long trips. With nothing more than a bit of food and a box of kleenex, the kids managed to amuse themselves for hours with wild stories and entertainment of various sorts. Here's a sample of the entertainment during today's 8-hour drive:


Photo: Moaning Myrtle in her kleenex wedding gown, with her fiancé the Water King, wearing his fetching toilet-paper tuxedo, dancing as finger-puppets. Costume assembly took quite some time, with the tuxedo proving the main challenge. Sophie was the costume designer for the Water King.

Erin and Sophie spend an hour or more doing dramatic readings from the juice and milk cartons, inventing many vitamins in the process and explaining that good sources of Vitamin S are squids, snails and slugs, and that it's not a coincidence that these are all "S" animals, because before scientists name new species, they put the animal in a blender and then do a vitamin analysis of the liquefied remains, and name the animal with the letter of the most prominent vitamin.

It is explained that cows are actually birds, not mammals, and that the apparent presence of mammary glands is due to blocked oviducts. The eggs are massive and internal, and as they build up inside they inflate the poor bird to bovine proportions. Leaking eggwhite can be 'milked' from the oviducts. Sophie expresses disgust that cows are not in any of our bird-watching books.

At least two hours are devoted to the mastery and continued embellishment of a rhythmic chant of Harry Potter character names, in the style of this Potter Puppet Pals production. Rather than 6 characters, my kids' version has over two dozen, and they spend a long time notating them, discussing which beats are syncopated, which come after the beat, how many repetitions in each bar, and so on. More rehearsing ensues. I get recruited to help. They manage to keep four or five contrary changing rhythms going at a time, despite much giggling. They christen it the Potterbel Canon....

Finally this week we got some time set aside to get back at math. Sophie was working on percentages & bank systems in word problems, and then on to some basic work with averages. We had a discussion about the role of savings vs. loan interest in allowing banks to make money. Averages are easy and intuitive for Sophie. She in a Good Math Zone right now, feeling comfortable and confident, and interested in discussions that extend the ideas we encounter in the book.

At violin lesson Sophie played her best Vivaldi a minor ever. Despite her good intentions, she had declined to work with me during her practicing two of the three times I offered. And the Corelli ensemble part we'd started to work on hadn't got properly mastered in time for her lesson. So she was reminded to get cracking on it. (It's not bad, but she is still playing it slowly with lots of hesitations.) Maybe she'll choose to work with me more this next week. She's been asked to work on some subtle little refinements in her bowhand to round out the big gains in bow direction, balance and point of contact that she's made over the last few months. She focused on this really well and did well trying some exercises out at her lesson.

So there you have it. What is, for me, a fairly typical O4L report.

Hump Day

Wednesday is usually Hump Day at Suzuki institutes, the day many people feel a little tired and drawn. Since we had a humongous Family Dance and Ice Cream Social last night which dragged on until dark, there was an extra reason for everyone to be tired. But most of the kids were still riding high today. Mine certainly were energized.

Fiona is loving her master classes. She's working on left hand dexterity and relaxing her left thumb. Her recital performance of "Two Grenadiers" was a huge crowd-pleaser yesterday. She's in just slightly over her head in "Violin Orchestra" where most of the other kids are over 10, many with sight-reading experience on other instruments, but the more beginnerish reading group wouldn't schedule for her because being in Book 3 she has a group class conflict. But she's so quick to pick stuff up by ear that she quickly catches on and she's not feeling unduly frustrated. In group class she's dwarfed by the teens, but she stays pretty well on-task and is enjoying herself.

Sophie did a confident solo at recital yesterday too with big tone and nice open bowing. Her master class has missed the mark a little; she's a bit of a tough nut to crack, this kid, as she gets more and more inhibited in her playing the more she thinks and the more she's talked to. She needs more of a slappin' about kind of encouragement ("sorry, not enough, give me more... no -- more ... no, twice as much ... getting there, now double it again!") rather than the gentle cautious stroking that her size and body language suggest she needs. She's a tough kid and she'll open up but only if she's ordered to, but you'd never guess that to look at her. Anyway, she does seem comfortable and motivated by the week. She's really enjoying orchestra and the Csardas she's doing in violin ensemble and is opening up her playing there.

Noah is riding high in all his classes. He's in the most advanced quartet (with Erin) and is doing fabulously. Master class is going well. Teachers always like working with Noah; he's quiet, sensitive and extremely musical, and responds very well to suggestions. He's enjoying orchestra, quartet and violin/viola ensemble and getting lots of just the right sort of challenge.

Erin is not getting much musical challenge, but is getting a good helping of time with her two closest friends and a fair bit of opportunity for leadership. Together with some of the faculty she a her friends have also engineered a 'special feature' ensemble, working up a rollicking Czech folk song featuring keyboard, percussion, accordion, voice and strings. Six faculty, four senior students, lots of foot-stomping energy!

While our institute is too small to offer lots of added value for advanced kids, we do allow and even encourage this sort of boundary-crossing, with senior students hanging out with and jamming with faculty. Erin and Noah and four of the other senior kids played in the faculty orchestra at tonight's "Tutti Night" event, for instance. They also took on the pseudo-faculty role of leading groups of violinists in some of the concerto movements they played. Good stuff.

So as we slide down the other side of Hump Day there's lots of good stuff happening. We're already dreading the end of the week.

A stringy week

This is how full my hard drive is. The pink bit is all that's left for my poor Windows XP to work with. Things are slow as molasses here and I certainly can't put new things on my computer right now. You'll have to be patient if I don't upload a lot of photos or videos just now. There's a bottleneck in the data flow. A new secondary hard drive is on the way. When that arrives my iPod will no longer have more memory than my desktop computer.


Today at the Suzuki Institute my elder two kids performed on solo recitals. They both blew me away. Noah's Bach Allemande was so sensitive and clean, musical and unrestrained, but yet still rhythmic and flowing. Erin's Bloch was a technical wonder full of power and passion. I did manage to squeeze a low-res still shot off the video camera. Somehow a tie-dye T-shirt doesn't fit with "an improvisational scene from Hasidic life," but you can trust me that the music fit the mood the composer had intended.

Once my hard drive arrives and the institute wraps up I'll have time to upload proper photos and videos. I'm taking them -- they'll just have to reside on tape and memory cards for a little while yet.

String games have taken the institute by storm. Cat's cradle and a zillion more. We have two faculty members who are experts, one of whom is teaching the kids tricks as part of their movement/folk-dance class and the other who is sharing freely of her expertise outside of class time. The stuff has caught on like wildfire and the faculty seem as caught up in it as anyone else.

Here's a typical scene from the lobby area ... kids eagerly watching, learning, sharing, waiting a turn with Marian, string loops in hand. They delightedly tried out string tricks on each other, on their parents, and on other faculty members.

There was a brief polite reminder necessary before the recital started today ... "strings in pockets, please." I love it when something this simple catches on like this, especially when it crosses generational boundaries and brings assorted dyads and triads of people together for fun and eager learning.

This year's shirts...

.... are red! We had only a few choices of made-in-Canada blanks because we needed something with matching colours in toddler, youth and adult sizes. The red seems to be a hit with most people. We wonder what colour-coded near-disaster will befall us this year. I thought it might be an armed insurrection, or a traumatic amputation. One of our cello teachers wondered about a communist revolution. I encouraged him to get busy starting one, but he had to go out to dinner.

That's Erin saying hello to her friend N., who also did the Edmonton-Montreal program, and who just blew in from Calgary. They've been apart for five whole days. Life's good again.

Community work crew

Today is Set-Up Day for our local Suzuki Institute. My kids are so excited to be heading into their intensive music weeks on home turf, they are thrilled to be part of the set-up crew. We got to the school this morning to move a piano and help with organizing things there only to discover that my compulsive mom and her compulsive sidekick had organized the stink out of the place already. We moved some chairs and stools, set up the T-shirts, put up signs and then it really was done. We had spent only an hour at it. It didn't seem enough. We were still raring to go.

The performance venue, recently renovated, still needed to be set up. Mysteriously one of the other members of the set-up crew had been warning my compulsively over-prepared mom away, telling her she shouldn't really go and see the venue yet. My kids and I headed over to see what we could do to help set up. The village has been adding a set of washrooms at the back, renovating store-rooms, preparing to move in a whole new set of interior equipment -- staging, chairs, etc.. It was definitely still a construction zone when we arrived. There was dirt, mud and drywall dust everywhere. Everywhere. The electrician was there with his huge heaps of tools and supplies, the bathrooms weren't finished, a volunteer brigade of locals was there pulling apart the temporary staging, trying to clean up bats of rotting fibreglass insulation, unpacking chairs and portable staging, risers, music stands. Keep in mind that the opening performance for our Suzuki Institute is tomorrow afternoon!

Well, we set to work. The kids worked really hard. They tore sticky labels off 250 brand new chairs and moved them down from the balcony two at a time. They used tools and instructions to assemble all the music stands. They swept and mopped and swept and mopped. The cleared a storage room, moved scores of wooden chairs upstairs and surplus new chairs into storage. They assembled the staging, they set up 200 audience chairs, pushed the concert grand around, swabbed railings and finials, hand-washed stairs, washed and moved tables, took down outdated signage, hauled dollies around, packed construction debris out. It took about 3 1/2 hours, and we didn't do it all ourselves by any stretch, but the transformation was amazing and the kids were a huge part of it. In that short space of time the venue went from a construction zone to a spankingly improved community hall looking its best. A good day's work.