Summer!

The weather might not realize that summer has arrived, but for Abbie it is official - school is over, the "big pool" at the country club is open for the season, and her summer day camps start today. This week she has a tennis/swimming camp - tennis in the morning and then swimming after lunch. At least four of her classmates are in the same camp, so she is looking forward to running around with her friends. As you can see, she loves jumping into the pool over and over and jumping off the diving board at the big pool. She is still in that phase, however, where any attempted dive ends in a belly flop. She doesn't seem to mind, though.

Although school is over, we are still doing weekly violin lessons at her teacher's house through the month of June. As I mentioned in the last post, there are five variations on the "Twinkle, twinkle" theme. In addition, there is the theme itself, which Abbie learned last week. We have now begun the long process of doing 100 repetitions of the six versions of "Twinkle, Twinkle." Once Abbie completes all 600 repetitions she will be ready to have her Twinkle Recital which means that she will go from being referred to as a "pre-Twinkler" to being referred to as a "Twinkler." She will learn other songs along the way, of course, but this right of passage seems to be a big deal for these Suzuki kids.

The other fun thing about this is that a different type of dried bean is used to count each of the six versions. For example, variation A is counted with kidney beans, variation B is counted with lentils, etc. Each time she completes a repetition, a bean goes into the jar. In the end, we will have 600 dried beans, which we will use to make bean soup (referred to as "Twinkle bean soup"). This is a cool way for the kids to visualize their progress and Abbie seems to be excited about amassing her 600 beans.

Below is the video of her solo from the very informal recital that they had during the last group lesson a few weeks ago. This is variation A: May Violin Recital