Having a quirky, genius kid is often delightful.
I have been teaching Soren a little bit of music theory. Actually, he has been teaching himself by reading the text in all the piano lesson books. But I'll pretend that I've been scaffolding it some.
This week he has been working on identifying triads, a task I never dreamed I would teach my 2nd grader. And then he figured out something additional that astonished and delighted me.
He is learning a song called "Cockles and Mussels" and I assigned him to say each chord name of the accompaniment while he practiced. We went over it in his lesson; at that time he found all the obvious triads as well as the ones that were inverted or split between hands. That was cool but didn't surprise me.
What did surprise me happened today, during his practice time.
He called to me from where I was stirring monkey mac in the kitchen. "Mom! I found a chord you didn't see!" I put down my spoon and hiked the baby up my hip before going to see his discovery.
He began to play the coda, saying the chord changes as they happened. "C major. D minor. E minor." When he got to the last two measures, he called out a chord change for each beat, emphasizing the second one: "d, F, G, C." After taking his hands from the keyboard, he explained to me how he had found his mystery chord on the second beat. Although the third in the left hand was held for two counts, the complete neighbor tone in the right hand made a new chord, changing an inverted d-minor chord into a root position f-major chord.
What I am trying to say is, he found a chord that was divided both by hands and by time.
That was when my jaw dropped. Seven years he has been my son and it wasn't until that moment that he floored me. How did he figure that all out?
My next thought was: this is going to be fun.
I have been teaching Soren a little bit of music theory. Actually, he has been teaching himself by reading the text in all the piano lesson books. But I'll pretend that I've been scaffolding it some.
This week he has been working on identifying triads, a task I never dreamed I would teach my 2nd grader. And then he figured out something additional that astonished and delighted me.
He is learning a song called "Cockles and Mussels" and I assigned him to say each chord name of the accompaniment while he practiced. We went over it in his lesson; at that time he found all the obvious triads as well as the ones that were inverted or split between hands. That was cool but didn't surprise me.
What did surprise me happened today, during his practice time.
He called to me from where I was stirring monkey mac in the kitchen. "Mom! I found a chord you didn't see!" I put down my spoon and hiked the baby up my hip before going to see his discovery.
He began to play the coda, saying the chord changes as they happened. "C major. D minor. E minor." When he got to the last two measures, he called out a chord change for each beat, emphasizing the second one: "d, F, G, C." After taking his hands from the keyboard, he explained to me how he had found his mystery chord on the second beat. Although the third in the left hand was held for two counts, the complete neighbor tone in the right hand made a new chord, changing an inverted d-minor chord into a root position f-major chord.
What I am trying to say is, he found a chord that was divided both by hands and by time.
That was when my jaw dropped. Seven years he has been my son and it wasn't until that moment that he floored me. How did he figure that all out?
My next thought was: this is going to be fun.
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