Friday, February 01, 2008

Strings and things

J is showing more initiative and excitement for strings than he ever did for TKD, baseball, art classes, anything.

He started getting pumped up a few weeks ago when the teacher announced the recital next month. As I mentioned, ex was bummed he'd miss it, so J picked up the practicing and played for his dad before he left.

I think his skill level has improved drastically. His strings class has 10 kids from his regular classroom and other regular classrooms have similar, probably 60-80 beginning strings kids total. The concert next month will bring together all these kids from different classrooms to play. I think they've had one or two practices with all of them together.

The other day, the teacher asked J's classroom of kids who plays the best among them and all of them indicated J and a girl named Nala. J and Nala got to choose a song from their book (he excitedly got to choose his favorite song, one called Carolina Breeze which he had practiced for his dad, the Carolina Boy) and the two of them will play a duet at the concert. A duet! I cannot wait.

I hope it goes better than this:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

They really performed a "classic" there.

Hope the recital goes well as well as the practice leading up to it.

Aunt Becky said...

Dude, a duet is awesome. Congrats to him. Ben is equally thrilled about being a member of the orchestra.

My poor ears.

Nikki Neurotic said...

Sounds fabulous! What kind of "strings" does he play? I took violin lessons eons ago...sadly, I wasn't very good.

Cricket said...

He plays violin, the one belonging to his great grandmother, specifically. It is probably 90 or 100 years old. If we hadn't had that, I would have tried to get him to play cello. In this school district, they do strings in the 4th, then bring in the rest of the orchestra in the 5th.

Anonymous said...

Hooray for J, and so nice that he gets to play the family violin.

I have a friend who's a fiddler, and competes up in Canada, and she's amazing.