PLINCKSTER

During the same preschool year or two that I was starting and then quitting piano, Mom also taught me the alphabet and how to read. She said they knew I was retaining the skills when I spontaneously read aloud the word "ELEPHANT" (if not quite correctly) on a mock ELEPHANT CROSSING traffic sign posted on the road to a local swimming hole. Spurred on by this unexpected triuph, Mom set me to practice reading out loud, a lot. We listened over and over to the song "Puff the Magic Dragon" which was then a new song on the radio, transcribing the lyrics. I made a comic book illustrating them. It didn't all make coherent sense, so the illustration for the line "green scales fell like rain" pictured a literal rain of triangular lizard scales dropping from the sky. Well, how  else  would you picture that line? Previous: About That Jump Ahead in the Piano Books      Next: Back to Piano

Incidentally, learning and continuing to keep in practice an entire method book goes along with young children's natural inclinations, I think. While I was starting this blog I was teaching a 4 year old boy who did this spontaneously, without it being required. The Suzuki Method requires memorization of all learned pieces from its string students to play together in groups, and most Suzuki piano students follow a similar regimen at least for the first book or two in that series. While I no longer teach Suzuki piano, I think the originators of the method had some good native intelligence about how children learn. After all, if you're going to take the trouble to learn to play a song, why would you throw it away, like a used paper towel, the day after it was mastered the way other methods almost force us to do? As another aside, after I wrote the previous post, my sister Kathy let me know that Mrs. Kent had bumped her up a level in the Thompson books too, from 3 to 5 (probably ...