Piano piano

M played Pat a Pan for the choir tonight at the Lighthouse event.  I'm so pleased that she is able to do the work to achieve these goals of mine.  She's gotten good enough that she is able to serve and see how fun it is to be an accompanist.  She played 3 songs for the primary program too.

I'm really pleased with her piano teacher and how she is pushed constantly and also how she rises to the challenge.  I often cannot believe it's my little girl doing all this.  At the same time, when she's doing all this it's hard to remember she's only 11.

She has her first band concert tomorrow.  I'm so excited for that experience.  She's so awesome!  And yet today when the children were playing "Guess what I'm humming."  she kept humming tunes the others wouldn't know because they were her band tunes.  And she also hummed the tune for "ABC" which is also the tune for 3 other songs at least,  and told the children they were wrong when they guessed any of the other tunes...

She does serve and volunteer a lot.  She likes to be tricky too.  Basically she is awesome but is still developing.

Governor M

At our homeschool group M won the election for Governor by one vote.  She ran as a democrat against a republican candidate that promised more lego play time and video game play time.  Nice!

Today I reminded her of kind generous women I knew on both sides of the aisle. 

Her motto was "Keep Calm, climb trees and vote for M!"

Magical Advice

M is trying to learn "Pat a Pan" on piano for the choir.

Tonight lP told her "Don't just run through it, actually practice

the parts you don't know."  M yelled back "I've been taking

piano for 5 years, I don't need your magical advice!"

Tonight we went to a friends house because the mother of this friend is having a class over the next 4 weeks about peer relations and emotional health.  There are 13 girls ages 10-14 and they talked about Fitting in vs. Belonging.  It was pretty great.

Classes

 M is in an astronomy class at the homeschool co-op and got to create this model of a star with a giant rice crispy treat and lots of candy.  Then she ate it.  She did share a lot of the candy with her siblings.

 M loves going to band.  I'm so glad that is working out well.  It's wonderful for her to go off and have these adventures of independence.  This is a mural in the hall at her school.  So fun.

happening

M has started playing the french horn!  This picture was just documenting the dings on the school horn she is borrowing. 

It's so cute!

Competent

Today as we were having the primary program practice M did some good work.  She figured out how to fix the soap dispenser in the women's rest room which had been just giving a tiny amount of soap.  She found a spare soap holder in the supply closet, and figured out how to open the case.  Then she figured out how to line up the bag of soap so that the push bar actually pumped out soap.

She's also going to be playing 3 songs for the program, and singing a duet with her friend H.

I love this girl her competence.

Musician

Watching M in a piano lesson is a thing of beauty.  Mrs. B pushes her hard.  When M is focusing in her lesson her face takes on the expression of eyes wide and jaw relaxed.  It makes me so proud to see her amaze the teacher.  Last week she practiced diatonic 5 note scales.  Then in the lesson Mrs. asked her to do Chromatic ascending, which is hard, then she said eventually she should do descending.  Then M did it!  Mrs. B and I looked at each other like "woah."

Mrs. B runs the lesson so efficiently jumping from theory to technique to technology to real world application and the hour flies by.  M is learning so many great things musically but also for when she has her own piano studio.  I'm so glad she has this amazing ability to put things together in her head and put it into practice.  Mrs. B talks about how M is one of the kids who is going to be able an accompanist for a choir.  I love it.