6.14.2011

idle time for learning



It's been slow going around here for a few days. A little fabric and grocery shopping, a car trip to the south bay just to look around, but not much else to get us out of the house into the deceptively sunny and very cold weather. A lot of lazing and lounging. Stella gets up to noodle on the piano almost every morning.





They say that kids' brains are like sponges from the get-go. I have seen that in the gradual acquisition of language, motor skills, in Stella's case a second language, etc. But the stage Stella is in right now is really something. It is just so obvious how quickly she is able to learn things. Her reading level grows almost exponentially from week to week. I can teach her a scale on the piano, thinking we'll come back to it and a week and review it, but she gets it right there and then. I am not a trained teacher, so it shocks me that she can hear or see something once and just know it. At my age, I have to review something several times to retain it. But she is literally soaking it up. She'll sit at the piano and peck out songs from Wicked or The Sound of Music by ear. She could tell she played the wrong note when trying to play a G scale this morning, which really floored me. She knew something was wrong with the F. It needed to be sharp, of course. 


Although Stella is absolutely amazing, I am sure this is not unique just to her. It's when the process of learning becomes overt. It probably can be attributed to her finishing her kindergarten year, but this idle time is definitely a factor, and in that itself is invaluable.




06.13.11







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