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Noah's Grade 1 Year
[The Preschool Years] [Kindergarten]
Noah turned six last fall. Legally he's registered as a homeschooler for the first time.
Noah now considers himself a reader and a writer, which speaks wonderfully for his confidence, if not his actual skills. He can write sentences which I can read, but I confess it helps that I can also to a certain degree read his mind and fill in the questionable spots. Nevertheless, I am really impressed by the entirely self-directed, inductive process he is using to crack the code of written language. He's not over the hump with his reading to the point that he can read for pleasure, but he can decode almost any phonetic word. He loves reading Garfield books. His reading skills are just gradually coming through life-experience and free-form self-motivated exploration. In March he began expressing some interest in formal math work and started working through the Miquon Math program. We're 2 months into things now and he's just whizzing along, halfway through the second book in the series. He has amazing mental math skills. The day I was going to explain to him what multiplication was he looked at a 3x4 on the page we'd just turned to and said "Oh, that sign means multiply, Erin told me. So that's 12, because two 3's is six, and two 6's is twelve." That's pretty typical of this kid's math learning.
Noah's "concentrating face" is always a part of his diligent and productive practising. |
Over the past year, Noah has made amazing progress on the violin. He now considers himself a real violin student and practices 30 minutes a day. His posture is excellent, and he is now working on learning "Gavotte" by Gossec at the end of Suzuki Book 1. He's also started working on some basic piano work and note-reading. His rhythmic reading is excellent and we're working with an interval-based approach to pitch-reading that he is gradually figuring out. He can play many simple tunes on the violin and especially on the piano by ear, and transposes easily into other simple keys on the piano, adding sharps and flats as necessary. He definitely has a rich understanding of music, one which he's starting to play out on his two instruments. He began formal piano lessons in February 2003. Here is one of his piano compositions, entitled "Achilles' Death":
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