E aged 3.5 starting out with Soft Mozart

I was not expecting much today as we all woke up feeling tired and grumpy. E's concentration was not great so I was hoping for maybe right hand of HCB and then stop.

She said she wanted to play French song and tried this:
R1 10/28 t76

I thought, hmmm - maybe let's stop for today. But no, she said she wanted to play Jingle Bells. And then, out of nowhere came the following score:
Jingle bells R1 39/45 t99 and she sang solfege for virtually the entire piece!!!!!!

Well, I was very excited and she earned three 'cakes' for that one! I'm not going to get over the top about it or expect her to repeat it in the near future but it's good to know what she can do if she feels in the mood.

We also experimented with different seats today and have discovered that the best temporary seat is for her to sit on a small 3 drawer cabinet that lives next to the desk - it is just the right height and does not swing around. Not exactly a standard piano stool but it seems to be working

I am really happy to report that we are still playing and making good progress

Because of my work schedule, it's only possible to play 3-4 times a week (the other days we do Little Musician in the mornings). She has become very motivated to earn the little presents from the bag. This means she is willing to play piano until she's earned all 10 'cakes' so she can then have a present (which I still say are sent by Hellene ). But she also seems to enjoy the piano and singing along. I hope this is also intrinsically motivating for her and with time I plan to make the rewards harder to earn. But at the moment I just want her to be playing and enjoying it.

I give one 'cake' for playing a piece and one for singing solfege. The singing has made a HUGE improvement to accuracy! Today I also said two 'cakes' for playing the left hand chords with the left hand only. She had a really good attempt. The score was low but she tried really hard, I was impressed.

I let her choose what she wants to play. She likes to have some control over things. Today she played the R hand score using her L hand. I'm hoping this is a good thing to build dexterity in the L hand too.

Some scores today:

Guess key - 33 in 24s (yesterday was 40 in 30s)
HCB R1 14/15 - t 38, then 13/15 t23 (both singing solfege)
JB R1 40/45 - t74 (singing solfege)
JB L1 7/32 t127 (using L hand only to make chords)

I do have video - I need to upload to youtube and I'll add it soon.

Oh and last week she was playing on a mat with black and white stripes and spontaneously sang Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do whilst jumping from stripe to stripe. And then back down again, both ways completely accurately. It is amazing what kids pick up. She would never have done this if I had asked her to - another example of Manda's "Focus on Input not Output" rule!

hellene wrote: Did you try to cut JB for her in segments?

Do you think I should? She is happy to play the whole piece at the moment but I can cut in half if you think that is better.

The low score with the left hand was due to learning to stretch out her fingers to make a chord with one hand (but if she doesn't want to do this again I won't push her).