Piano: A Conversation with Lucia

After some months of teaching herself with the aid of a book and her mom (who does not play piano but can read music), Lucia decided it was time for formal piano lessons. Here's an interview with her about the piano and a couple of videos of the songs she's now practicing. Enjoy!

m: What do you like best about playing piano?
L: Really I don't have any specific thing I like best about piano. I just sort of like playing it, making music, and having fun with it.

m:What's your piano teacher like?
L:My piano teacher is very very nice, and I really like her. She lets me decide about a lot of the things I want to do, the music I want to play and stuff.

m:Is piano a challenging instrument?
L:I think it can be challenging, but I had been playing it by myself for a while and just sort of fooling around with it, and that sort of made me get the feel of it.

m: You played recorder last year in the orchestra. Is piano very different from recorder?
Very different. It's a lot more complicated, and you have to concentrate a lot more. You use both of your hands like you do in recorder, but in piano you have to concentrate separately on each hand because they're each doing a different thing.

m:Do you enjoy practicing? How often do you practice?
L:Yes, I do. I very much enjoy practicing. I like to just go to the piano and start playing. I practice once a day, sometimes twice a day. I go through all my songs, and my teacher gave me an exercise book where I do some exercises with my hands.

m:What is your favorite song to play on the piano?
L:I don't have a favorite song. I like a lot of songs that I play.

Off With Their Heads!

Happy Halloween!

Fingerpainting

I stumbled upon this video of Lucia at about age 2, and I thought it was a good illustration of her early unschooling tendencies. In the video she's fingerpainting, but I use that term loosely as she quickly abandons the limitations of using only her fingers and her canvas steadily expands beyond the boundaries of the paper until her body becomes an extension of her artwork. This is a video about pure process. It shows the intensity and the wonder of a young child's exploration of color, texture, movement, mixing and layering when given the time and freedom to play with paint.
The original video was about 20 minutes long, but I've reluctantly edited it to under 10 for posting on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlownXbTPK0

Prologue

Lucia started writing a new story recently. She sat with her notebook and pen, looking like a writer, gazing out the window for a while and then scribbling furiously. After she'd filled one page she stopped and asked, "What's a prologue?"

I said, "A prologue is a kind of introduction. It tells you something about the story you're going to read."

"That's what I thought," she said. "How do you spell prologue?"

Overlook Mountain Letterbox

Our latest letterboxing adventure took place on Overlook Mountain in Woodstock. This is the site of the ruined Overlook Mountain House, the original incarnation of which was destroyed by fire in 1875. So, they built a second one, and that sank into the swamp... uh... burned down in 1923. The final incarnation of the hotel, seen here, was abandoned in the financial climate of the 1930's and eventually suffered the same fate as its predecessors, succumbing to fire in the 1960's. There are signs posted all around the ruins warning us of the risk of trespassing in the dangerous structure, but far be it from us to let personal safety stand in the way of finding a letterbox. The box was hidden in the main fireplace of the hotel. The fun part was having to look up inside the chimney to find the well-hidden box. Stamps from prior seekers...Lucia leaves her mark... 'pony girl.'Overlook Hotel stamp.The view from the top of Overlook Mountain. That's the Hudson River you see in the distance.Jadae didn't want to get too close to the edge...From the top of the fire tower (one of the 5 remaining historic Catskills fire towers).
You can see Mount Tremper in the photo below. It's the wide mountain in the middle of the frame with the signal tower bisecting the right side of it. That's where we live - at the base of that mountain.

Lucia is 9

The guest list for Lucia's 9th birthday party seemed to grow and multiply exponentially like a bacterial culture. Before I knew it there were 18 children expected, but for various reasons not excluding one emergency room visit (everyone's fine now), they came in waves. And that was just as well considering the rainy weather that forced us all indoors for most of the day. The night before the party, as I waded knee-deep in cupcake batter, Lucia said, "Next year I think I'll have a small birthday party - just a few of my very closest friends." You couldn't have decided that two weeks ago? I thought. But honestly, the planning and execution of elaborate themed birthday parties is one of my great pleasures in life. So I was a bit disappointed when Lucia declared that this year there would be no theme. "It will just be like a big playdate," she'd said. And if the kids could have been outside running around in the woods and jumping on the trampoline, that would have been fine. But as the day approached and the weather refused to cooperate, the thought of eighteen kids on a big playdate inside the house became increasingly distressing. Then at the last minute Lucia decided she did indeed want some organized games, a treasure hunt, a pinata... a theme! Dogs! So, we made some pupcakes:We made a pinata shaped like our dog, Gatsby. I have very few hangups really, and most of them have to do with things like "misused" quotation marks and mispronunciation of words like 'noo-kyoo-ler'. But Nick enjoys teasing me because I find the whole pinata thing really disturbing. I mean who wants to watch their child destroy something violently with a stick and then scrounge on the ground for candy as a reward? But I could hardly resist the challenge of creating a Gatsby pinata, and Lucia agreed to fill the pinata with some of her extensive collection of party favors in addition to the candy.
The scrounging was fairly genteel.
Everything went smoothly. A good time was had by all. And my daughter is nine years old!

The Penguin Story

Lucia's got a new story up at her story blog. It's one that she wrote and illustrated bit by bit over the course of the last (school)year. Since then she's been waiting patiently for me to get around to scanning the artwork and publishing the post. Please take a look and let her know what you think!