A typical day

I woke Rachel up at 10 am this morning. Since she started to drink about 120ml of the 225ml of chocolate Pedisure each night, she started sleeping even longer about 10 hours or more. Well she agreed to drink milk powder so as to upgrade her violin. En ce moment, she is using her 2 year old size 1/16 chinese violin meant for 3-4 year olds.

After simple breakfast of HL chocolate milk and biscuits, with her favourite OKTO channel she was ready for learning. Today she wanted to stay home the entire day since yesterday she spend much time outdoors, especially walking along the beach and at Polliwogs where she attended my ex-uni classmate cum colleague Nikki's kids, Ian 5 and Jan 3's birthday party.

Rachel told me she enjoyed the party. Her favourite time was the pinata whacking and the Polliwogs huge inflatable playground. But as a mummy, I felt the place was overcrowded with parents, and about 100 plus kids including those from 2 private parties and it was so NOISY and NERVE-WRECKING. At $18 per entry its a tat expensive given the noise and overcrowding. I will not visit again unless I have another party to attend. $18 can be put to better use like getting a good meal or treating a good friend to coffee or adding another Barbie dvd to Rachel's collection.

At 11am, we did art. We made a poster Ma Ferme with many animal drawings cut-outs and wrote both the french and chinese words for each farm animal. Included was a lift the flap monkey face that revealed a friendly boy saying "Welcome to my farm" in the speech balloon. It's simple fun and Rachel had learnt to look up the words in both chinese and french and spell simple french words like : canard (duck), mouton (sheep), poule (hen) while she recognises grenouille, tortue, oiseau, cheval, couchon, etc

Next we watercoloured 6 Tigger and Pooh pictures, "laminate" it with cellophane tape and cut them out as puzzles. We decorated an empty plastic art case with Pooh and Friends cut outs to contain the newly made puzzles.

After a simple seafood noodle lunch, we went on to our favourite computer/music room where she joule le piano for a short while and decided to listen to itunes and read along a French book. It's from Bermitz kids "Adventures with Nicholas- A vist to Grandma" (Les aventures aves Nicholas- Une visite chez grand-mere)

We have 3 such French cd books and she particulary enjoyed the song section and the French/English dictionery section the most!!!!

I am ending this blog to now supervise her on the violin and the piano. Usually, we will practise the piano first, revising her Poco Piano 1 or The Leila Fletcher Piano Course 1 while I focus on her rhythm and theory at the same time. Daddy the pianist will oversea the technique, though we have yet to start her on any Mozart sonata. (perhaps twinkle twinkle little star is counted as one variation). It's scary that some kids as young as 5 are already playing








There is a huge difference between a child prodigy and a child talent. A child prodigy would be someone like Evgeny Kissing where he learnt to play the piano at 1 and by the time they are 5 they played with orchestrals all over the world. The same goes for Sarah Chang who auditioned and was accepted by the Julliard School at 5 playing the Bruch Concerto!!!! A young talent will be one who had the support of parents to start their musical education early. Hopely with passion and practice, many young talents go on to become great musicians eg Koji Toyoda and Toshiya Eto (also Akiko Suwanai's teacher) Read Nurtured by Love by Shinichi Suzuki.

To us, the most important is that rachel loves music and enjoys making music be it piano or violin. If her passion is in it, I have no doubts she will excel. However, music education is liken to learning a language. How early do one start to learn, read and write English, chinese or french???? Since music is a language, it need to be cultivated since young, at home, the environment, the parents, etc all play a major part. Music is a gift from God and the great giver will see to it that the recipient is greatly blest. Amen