Must Be Santa

After a feverish day and night yesterday, Grace woke up like a different child today.  All morning she was bouncing around the house singing and dancing - back to her normal self!  I was happy, of course, but I was also glad that I didn't have to tell her that she would have to miss her piano recital this afternoon.  She has been practicing Must Be Santa since before Thanksgiving, so getting to perform today was important for everyone.

Grace's music teacher has dozens of students. Today's recital was the first time she divided up the older students (who take private lessons) and the younger ones who participate in small group classes called Music For Young Children (MYC) into two separate groups.  MYC nvolves a multisensory approach to learning music and keyboarding. The MYC program includes 24,000 children and 900 teachers on 3 continents.  Our teacher is the only MYC trained teacher in the area.  As a result, she is in high demand.  She requires that all students participate in three years of MYC before she will consider taking then as a private student.  Grace has been with her for less than a year....so we have a long way to go.

None of the children today were older than 3rd grade and the most impressive ones were playing Beethoven.   I can only hope we will get there some day.  Kyle and I are learning the type of dedication and commitment this takes.  There are a lot of ups and downs and teamwork to keep Grace motivated to practice.  But, those practice sessions pay off when she performs as well as she did today.  And, it is so cool to see our little person sitting at a big grande piano like she belongs there!

Grace played her piece alone first and then her teacher joined her for a duet.  The hard part of the duet is your timing has to be perfect so you can play with another person.  We have been practicing this for a couple of weeks with Miss Nancy's part on a CD. Grace did great!

There are four children in Graces "Sunrise II" class.  Lauren introduced the group for their ensemble performance of Jingle Bells.

Miss Nancy tries to have every student perform more than one piece at each recital.  Most did a piano piece and performed with their classmates.  Grace's group's interpretation of Jingle Bells was cute.  They were all so focused on their teacher's cues during the song!