FINALLY Started! Background & Update:Joey Age 31mo

Mandabplus3 wrote: Woah! That ooh me ages to read through

wowza, i didn't expect someone to actually read ALL of it - i was mostly just rambling to encourage myself to post, but thank you!! i feel honored you took the time!!

busy house, sounds like you will need a second keyboard soon, we have 4 playing hear too and the que backs up at times...it's always me who misses out too

yes, you're right! we actually have a second one, but it is not yet hooked up to a computer, so i'm thinking it will be a while before we start to incorporate it, but we'll see. as of now, the keyboard is hooked up to the main tv that j uses, so i don't get as much time as i'd like either. we're looking at switching some things around, so hopefully i'll be able to play while he's watching tv too - that would be great!

Ok so some thaughts...
Stick to view 1 for your kids, at least always start at view one until their time scores are at least lower than their number of notes. It will really help cement the relationship between the music staff and the piano keys as well as the up and down nature of pitch on a piano. Also the size is really important at that age.

honestly, i'm hesitant about sticking to the vertical view, since he truly does well with the horizontal when he's there. his time is really a result of moving around and not being 'disciplined' while at the keys. i HAVE given thought to making his SM time more disciplined, though, 1) he's at that age, i think, where i need to instill it more, 2) i see that you and nadia and others seem to do well with it, so i know it can be done and feel that it should be (wish us luck). i'm not convinced that he's not understanding the relationship between the notes and the keys or that viewing in 3 vs 1 alters that concept so much ... but AM giving your comment MUCH IMPORTANCE in making my decision! THANK YOU. just am being honest with sharing my thought process. the MAIN reason i'm really considering alternating back to level 1 is for the size. since he has that preference, i think there's a reason for it and if it's preferred, then i'm guessing his interest in playing will be greater. still mulling it over, though.

For you do whatever you feel comfortable with.
Two a day! Ummm that's pretty ambitious. I would say two a day for sight reading practice ( no pictures to tell you what the notes are) this would take you only a couple of minutes and then maybe one a week for perfecting and memorizing if you want to be so ambitious. two new songs a day wouldnt allow you to work at a challenging level and wouldn't give you enough time to polish your pieces and add feeling.... If you are starting at the very basic and are finding it too easy post your scores and Helene will suggest something to challenge you a bit. Also your time is well spent playing the soft Mozart games too.
Keep track of your scores in a physical note book. If you try to keep track on the computer it will slow you down ALOT as you switch between the program and your notes. We have a note book each, I recommend they are all different colours as that annoys me about mine all being red and not instantly recognizable for each kid. in two months I have used about 30 pages in my book.

honestly, aside from time with joey singing solfege while he plays, i haven't been using sm for myself, just synthesia. but as i spend more time with sm, my interest grows. my goal isn't to memorize songs, but to be able to play when reading the notes, so that's what i'm working on - playing well what i read, and yes, i'm starting out with definite basics! so 2/day is quite doable in a few minutes, so that i can get through synthesia's 150+ songs by christmas. of course, i've been sick all week and haven't really played , so we'll see how that goes! i'm so glad you posted, though, because i've spent so much time focusing on joey that i forgot about myself, so this was a welcome reminder that HEY - I'M SUPPOSED TO PLAY TOO! i need to make something more visual near the keyboard to track playing time, too. although it is quite easy for us to update google docs on my phone or another screen page, maybe the ipad too (haven't tried yet), i think that having something that we can actually see while passing by the keyboard will encourage us (adults) to sit and try. the lovely thing about synthesia is that it keeps track of it for us, so we don't have to write anything down. i should put this as a SUGGESTION FOR SM! it makes all the difference, i think. as for the games, we're waiting on a new dangle, since we had to order again but it should be here soon! CAN'T WAIT. i read about a free demo of the games, but the links don't seem to be working - wish they were!

For Joey do hot cross buns right hand until it is very good. There is no need to jump him to ode to joy or other pieces yet. His aim is to memorize the right hand playing so you can add left hand playing. Work on no more than 2 pieces at a time with him to start with. And if his scores are huge then learn to cut the piece so you can work on one section at a time. This would be very useful for him learning ode to joy. Also sing it. It's important to encourage the solfege singing. This helped us immensely!

yes, thank you - agreed. the only reason we started with ode was because after we lost our dangle, that was all we had access to use. then, the starter kit became available for free, so we had access to hot cross buns. we tried it once and he did very well, but i forgot to write it down! lol but i'm glad you think that two is ok, so i will add hot cross daily and continue to let him play ode (he's getting the hang of it and has started singing the beginning randomly in solfege while NOT in front of the keyboard). i DO need to learn to cut the piece, though - i think that will help. saw a brief mention of it by nadia - something about cutting and pasting? will figure it out eventually

The curriculum from memory is under the start here or getting started file that you would have seen when you opened your soft Mozart file. I would have to go looking to give you further instructions. It is a guide only and we only use it to check me arnt missing any major parts. But it does seem to be good for young kids and musically challenged parents

still no luck in finding, but i do have one with the starter kit that we will try using this coming week. we'll see how it goes

You are making great progress and all that piano enthusiasm in your house is doing wonders for your children's learning. Well done.

thank you, thank you! your post means all the world in helping keep us motivated! BIG HUGS

BIG HUGS and karma to you! Thanks for all your encouragement and support feel free to check out synthesia ( www.synthesiagame.com , i think). you may not like the free version (we paid the $25 to unlock the full program forever), however, the free version also has ability to demo several songs in 'full mode' unlocked.

as for joey and doing level 1 vs 3 ... i think we'll just 'play it by ear' haha no pun intended he does have good grasp, i think, mostly due to kinderbach (we're on week five of that and he asks for it EVERYDAY). but, we'll see. i DO want to solidify that connection. your analogy is good. although, doh! with joey, i didn't know about doman and dots haha, so we jumped straight into numbers and counting from the get-go. so far, so good ... or so i think and as for me, yes, if i can get keyboard time, i will be sure to try my hand more at levels 2 and 4 for the challenge

Yowza! I was looking back and realized that we JUST started SM THIS week - tuesday - and it seems like we've been doing this much longer lol i'm not sure why, especially because we don't do it for that long each day. maybe it's b/c it's been on our mind for over 3 months. who knows, but we're having a good time with it!

also, i posted here thursday, but apparently i didn't post an update of progress :doh: again! and it's so EASY to forget what actually happened, since the days just seem to repeat, repeat, repeat so here goes our updates:

Joey -Thursday (3/8 ) Played Ode to Joy 25/30 in 582. The time is not a good indicator, since he went to the bathroom in the middle of it, and we didn't play today (fri), but once he came back, he started and finished relatively quickly. it will be neat to see how he does this weekend. I have no doubt that he would have done 30/30, but he likes seeing the spider. So, after I saw that he was intentionally hitting the wrong notes, I recalled how he likes to get us flowers (in the game - we stopped him from picking flowers in person, telling him that it was making them sad ... so now he only picks ones that aren't attached. b/c it's cold out, he's been bringing me fallen leaves and random rocks, instead! i love them so much, but only because they come from my little guy!) and i recalled how he loves the KinderBach characters and keeps blending them in with the soft mozart game, so I told him that each character has a flower waiting for us, but that if he doesn't get it, the spider takes it, and then we won't have it, so we'll be sad. And it worked!! We didn't have a chance to play today (Fri 3/9), but I will try this weekend and see if this visual still works. Looking forward to him getting perfect scores (in less time!) Maybe some of his father's competitive edge is rubbing off on me (even if it is against self ... for joey ... hmmm).
Also, Thursday, miracle or miracles - We found the missing dangle!! It seems to have fallen out in the bag before we returned the computer with the sm disc inside - YAY! I already ordered the other dangle, though, and KNOW how clumsy we are, so definitely will keep both and don't regret repurchasing and having it out of the way, especially bc i have such a appreciation for the program now. So thrilled we found it, though.
Introduced the Guess the Key game and we played for a while. Joey was fine at first until i exaggerated the 'oh no, the spider bit' and from then on he was really apprehensive about the spider, wanting to run behind a chair even (clearly his imagination is pretty developed lol), or have me do it for him - i didn't, i just kept talking him into doing it. we spent a considerable amt of time playing the guess the key game, though, and today (friday) he asked for it again, so we played again a little before gymnastics. no time to play a song today, but we will continue practice and playing into the weekend.
he asked for mickey this morning, so i searched for a midi to upload so i can learn and teach him, but this was all i could find. i'm hoping that the song will inspire him more.

it's a start and better than nothing! but if you find something better, please do share
as for hanon 1 practice - i forgot to do them with him. i practiced a small bit, and was going to introduce the phrasing to him "stretch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7", but forgot!
we did, practice perfect pitch by playing our own version of 'guess the key' in which he is somewhere else and i pick middle c to c2(?) and play a note. after which he has to tell me which kinderbach character it is. i started by asking him for the reply in solfege, but the character replies he came up with on his own, so we stayed with that. no harm. they are like friends to him now (we are on week 5, monday will be our final disc - week 6, and then we will start on our 2nd rotation of the discs, back to disc 1, etc. the goal is to keep rotating through them one, maybe two more times, and then start doing the activity sheets - we currently only view them in the car, except this past week in the house since i was sick and cancelled ALL out-of-the-home activity *sigh*). thinking back to nadia's solfege dolls, i think i may print out the characters and put the solfege on them and flash them in order for him ... or better yet, attach the sound and create an LR track for him. hmmm i'm a bit of a lazy mom *sigh* and don't do much with him if it involves anything 'craft' related. for that, we go to a craft playgroup 3x/wk. it's just not my thing, but maybe i'll be motivated with this. i will give it thought and decide later. my goal is definitely for the kiddos to be able to hear the notes similarly to how they hear words, and in the same way that joey can spell a word aloud based on its sound, i want him (and eventually kaelie) to be able to decode a piece and see the notes in their mind's eye ... is it not a big deal for it to call up characters in these early stages? lol
i wonder: do children who learn the solfege images still recall them later on and not move away from them into 'adulthood'? i don't necessarily want to create a crutch for them, but an aid/tool, to get them 'there'. and if 'there' means that they keep recalling the images (solfege and/or kinderbach), then is that a big deal? ideally, i'd like those images to be replaced by the actual music sheet images floating in their heads. does anyone (hellene?) have experience on this and can answer? i think i will post this separately too, to increase visibility to my question. (done, here is that link: softmozart.com/forum/15-learning-experie...ing-images.html#2451 )

so anyway, back to perfect pitch, here are some videos that inspired me:





(yay, bk momma )

if you search youtube for perfect pitch, you'll come across some neat things, including the fact that despite 'absolute' or 'perfect pitch' being teachable, it is still a 'rare phenomenon' and so people track their lives and how it is with it.

thanks to this search, i came across a perfict pitch app called 'pitch master' that i need to check out: apps.usedhonda.jp/pm/ do share if you know more about this or any other apps. until now, we've been playing a few musical apps that resemble 'simon' that have been working with his listening ability. i HAVE noticed that since starting sm, he has been asking much more "What's that" to any new/random sound, as well as randomly telling me what he hears - pretty neat, i think!

Kaelie still merrily banging, bopping, and belting out sounds on the keyboard and from every orifice

Daddy hasn't played since he beat my synthesia record. his motivation is competition, so i have to beat his score for him to play again *sigh* my goal is ME driven, and competing with him kinda tires me, since it takes away from my goal (sigh reading, not high scores). SO, if you have suggestions on how to gear him to doing it on his own, i'm all ears

Mommy i've been sick for 10 days and counting (recover from one, just barely, and am hit with something else). that said, i haven't had the energy to do 'extras' for myself. but today we finally got out of the house and are moving around again, so hopefully this weekend i'll have some energy to devote to me, after computer catch-up time, which is what i'm doing now.

A BIT ABOUT US: www.softmozart.com/forum/2-introduce-you...-from-va-usa--d.html
OUR SOFTMOZART BEGINNINGS: softmozart.com/forum/33-progress-diaries...tejoey-age-31mo.html
THE PROGRESS THREAD BEFORE THIS: softmozart.com/forum/33-progress-diaries...cially-starting.html
WHERE THIS THREAD LEADS: softmozart.com/forum/33-progress-diaries...-joey-age-31-mo.html
OUR JOURNEY TO DATE: softmozart.com/profile/1064-queriquita.html - IN OUR STATUS (hope to update our status with each new progress thread)

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Thoughts for the week: I'm excited. I have seen progress, as is to be expected coming from 0, but more than progress, I have seen enthusiasm, and that has inspired me to mention SoftMozart to several other parents and organizations in hopes that they expose children to such a wonderful gift as 'natural' music ability. Looking forward to week 2!