Progress of Lily, Owen, & TmT

I just wanted to post that my daughters semester ended with her local teacher, so we are picking up where we left off with SM. My son has been staying with Grandma and my extended family for about the past month, so he will be very out of practice once I see him in a couple of weeks since he has not been near a piano. (I miss my little guy sooooo much!) I will be bringing SM with me though when we relocate, so we can practice while we stay with family for the summer before the move.

I am looking to pick SM back up with Lily, but where I always get stuck is knowing what fingers to use! It stops me in my tracks. I basically have to pick a song, sit there and write down the finger sequence to ensure that I am teaching her correctly. In the future, I wish there was a way to change the display from solfege images to note names AND to finger numbers for those who can already read the music. Or they could be color coded with a number inside so you would know the note and the finger number right offhand. I don't think that's the direction SM is going to go, but I thought I would put that out there anyway. The option would be nice!

Or, maybe there could be a way to print the sheet music with the finger numbers on it. It's just time consuming to sit there and decode what the correct fingers are. So now I need to pick what song she can learn now and figure out the fingers.

Hellene,

Here are her recital pieces from last week. I think she played longer/more difficult songs over Christmas though, which she learned on SM. (Joy to the World and Ode to Joy)

Oh, and just a note of explanation...she saw this cartoon image online and became convinced that it is the correct way to curtsy.



Anyway, here is her school wide recital where they played one song each:



And here is her graduation recital:

We definitely have not had colors on our keys for a year now, so that is not an issue in our case. I actually think they were vital in initially encouraging her to use all of her fingers in the first place, so once she understood that you can use more than your index finger and she learned the placement of the keys, we took them off. We had been using SM for a while before that and she just pecked away with her index finger. So, different strokes for different folks I guess? Anyway, that issue is behind us anyway so I am not going to sweat it.

I just want to avoid training bad habits, you know? I will give the book another read, I have not read it in about a year or so.

If you look at her Christmas recital ( I think it is posted earlier in this thread?), I left her to her own devices with choosing her fingers and she has several incorrect crossovers. She then developed "muscle memory" for it from playing them incorrectly so many times and it was ingrained and too late for her teacher to correct before the recital.

She can read and sing music on pitch the first time through (though she can definitely get faster), has absolute pitch, transposes music, can memorize songs, etc, but does not use "correct" fingers so it's the main thing we are working on. There is room for improvement in all of those areas of course, but there is the most room when it comes to correct fingering. Overall, I like SM because it makes practice more efficient and gives immediate feedback. I very much want it to work for us. I think there are some mixed messages between the methodology here and what we are getting from her local teacher, so I have to take that into consideration.

But yes, I read the thread on fingering earlier this evening, I will try to reread the book again as well. It seems like tolerance of "kid finger placement" is like using "kid spelling" I guess, a bridge to the real thing.