Joyschool Finished

This year of Joyschool has proven such a wonderful experience. Not only does it provide meaningful time with my children, it also extends me to others around me. I have loved the experience this year. We focused on the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, numbers up to 10, and various life lessons. Since I plan on doing this again, I am going to write down some of the things I would like to include this year. I think some of the topics we had could be extended to a much larger units, such as
Wellness: stress/destressing, exercise, eating healthy foods, work, play
social skills: Being a peacemaker, sharing/taking turns (play games where we have to share or take turns), table manners, accepting differences, Making new friends, etc....
Safety: emergency preparedness, rules/laws,


One of the things that I would like to change during joyschool is feeling pressure to plan my lesson around the holidays. It felt like there was ALWAYS  a holiday coming up that we were basing our lessons around. I am okay including holidays with our curriculum, but it felt kind of silly like holidays were the only thing we needed to learn about. They are good to know.

I would like to be better at talking about the days of the week and months of the year. Perhaps I will make a fun joyschool calendar to follow. it will have different pictures to represent birthdays and holidays and we can talk about the days of the week and the months of the year as well as things coming up. It would be good for them to get a sens of time. Also with clocks. Maybe always do certain things at certain times and talk about those times. I liked having things open that we could be creative with our teaching and not feel bad if we didn't follow it exactly.

Post Recital

The Recital did prove motivating for everyone. So did the movie theme. Everyone had their pieces down, my son included. Now we are post recital. It is nice to move on to new things, and now I need to figure out what my students still need to learn. Being trained in teaching as well as in piano gives me some needed skills as a piano teacher. However, I have not had any formal training to be a "piano teacher." It leaves me wondering what there still is to learn for myself and what there still is to teach my students. Here are some things I have learned about piano:

1. It is more than technicalities. When you play with feeling, that's when you touch lives, including your own. There are different ways to play. People are disappointed when you accompany an upbeat song really slow and quiet. However, depending on the way you play a song, you can turn an upbeat song into a lullaby. Maybe that would be a fun thing to try. Give each person a simple song to play a specific way (in the manner of the adverb):  peacefully, angrily, happily, sadly, etc....

2. When you accompany someone, you have to be able to follow the singer/conductor. That would be a skill we could work on. They play, but they have to keep their eyes partly on me to follow what I am doing with my hand.

3. Playing the melody louder than the others parts.

Those give me some ideas for the next little while. It's amazing what good a little bit of reflection will do. We can focus on accompaniment skills for a while.