Piano Progress Update (C+J)

Chloe and Josiah are continuing piano lessons (with me, of course!) and doing well.  If I haven’t mentioned it before, Chloe has gone through many phases of the “I don’t want to play piano” and then cycles back to the “I love piano and wish I could play that song I heard so-and-so play” and in between hits the “I’m indifferent towards piano so I’ll go ahead and practice without complaining.”  I’m quite certain this is normal.  Overall Chloe is progressing fine.  She struggles with keeping her counting between eighth notes and quarter notes steady.  We’ve actually started having her play a rhythm game on my phone to help with recognizing rhythms and keeping a steady beat while she taps them.  We’ll see if that helps or not–she just thinks it’s so fun to be able to use my phone.  She has a friend in her grade that just passed her in the books and she’s bummed.  But I did point out that he practices about double the minutes that she does and that’s what happens when you practice more!  🙂

Josiah has finally started to dwindle in his amazing over-enthusiasm for practicing and learning. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still more eager than Chloe, but I accidentally left him on the same songs for over a month (during contest season–I spaced giving him a lesson for over a month!  Yikes!) so he got bored.  No wonder really.  But now we’re starting to get back into the groove and his eagerness is returning.  He’s learning a song called “Taco Fiesta!” for the recital that he thinks is so cool.

And of course, Maddie Mae is always trying to sneak into the studio to play on the piano.  I’m hopeful that she’ll enjoy playing someday.  For now she sure enjoys being a big girl and climbing up on the bench all on her own and playing.  She does a really nice job of playing with her fingers more than just pounding.