Performing the repertoire

If it's Sunday then it's repertoire day. Rather than Twinkles, scales, composition, reading, review, polishing and learning, on Sundays we do concert (supposedly) standard performance and reading only. It's important that each piece is performed as many times as possible, but if my son were to play each piece that he knows every day, that would take up a lot of practice time. So instead we review three pieces a day in a lucky dip, and all the pieces once a week. The aim in review is to put into practice all the polishing points we know. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my son is clearly thinking about Sonic. We can but try.

Today was not such a good repertoire performance. We made the mistake of rushing off to see Grandma before doing piano time. When we got back, my son was burning to play with his best friend, our neighbour's little boy, and I wanted to get some gardening done during the brief midwinter daylight hours. So  performance was required after extracting the boy from the neighbour's house where he'd got hyped up through playing computer time.

It's been my experience that the best way to handle outrage and grumps is to ignore them. This generally works for us, and it's nice to see my son's mood alter as playing progresses, as long as I don't exacerbate the situation by offering comment. By the end of the repertoire he is almost bouncy again, and is thinking (somewhat) about what he's playing and trying (somewhat) to play well.

For reading we're working on page 46 of Methode Rose. This is a rather difficult rhythm to play - a kind beat and a half followed by half a beat. My poor son has struggled and has taken literally weeks over this page but he's finally getting there. We clap the rhythm first, then sing it, then he plays each hand separately, then finally together. Again and again the original rhythm became lost when he tried to put his hands together, but we have nearly cracked it for all the songs on the page. Hooray!