Saturday, July 25, 2009

Maggie's Recorder

Did I teach her how to play the recorder? Did one of her sisters?

A friend, Denise, mentioned recently how her daughter was busy teaching herself hymns from Lutheran Service Book. Maggie has been doing that too. She's also been spending time at the piano, plucking out tunes, teaching herself in part by quasi-reading the music, in part by ear, in part by asking questions, and in part by bits and pieces of piano-instruction books. Not your standard way to learn music, but it's working for her. (This is similar to how she learned to read books -- seeing/reading the written words to things she'd already half-memorized. The reading helped out her memory, and her memory helped out the decoding.)

Now, tonight, she uses the piano primer of hymns to start playing hymns on the recorder instead of on the piano. She wanted me to show her the scale again, and then began figuring things out. After a while, she asked about fingering for an F-sharp and a B-flat. And there she went!

1 comment:

  1. I hope you like the sound of recorder! ;)

    I remember very distinctly learning to read in a similar fashion. I remember reading books my teacher read soon after they read it to the class. That way I could figure out the words I didn't know because I had recently heard them in the same context.

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