Amazing...

Before her practice I always give Haley time to "play" with her violin and she practices those songs she is figuring out for herself and fiddles around with it (little play on words there) learning new songs, finding pieces that sound like a song and making up songs, and figuring out different ways to move her bow (like up, up, up or down, down, down instead of up and down). Yesterday, she played during that time and figured out that there are many more notes on her violin than the ones she has been allowed to play so far. She figured out that Concerto in A by Vivaldi has higher notes further down on the E string- she found those and I heard her practicing the passage she figured out over and over until she could make her fingers hit those new notes.

Last night, she listened to her Celtic fiddling DVD and figured out the second part of the polka she started to learn. Later she was fiddling around and she discovered, almost accidentally, that she could play more than one note per bowing and she started playing Gavotte in G minor (I forget by whom) from the 3rd Suzuki CD. I was sitting right next to her watching TV while she played with her violin and I don't even know how she did it. Suddenly she was just playing with long bowings and all the notes in that bowing. She must have played her violin, including her practice time, more than 3 hours yesterday.

I wonder if this is normal for Suzuki trained kids. All this experimentation and the drive to master new techniques. I am trying to have her listen more to non-Suzuki pieces (why I bought the fiddling DVD) so she will work to learn those rather than the Suzuki pieces because I want her to be taught those and not learn improper techniques but the Suzuki songs are the ones she knows right now because she listens to them and hears the "big girls" playing them. They are the songs she loves so they are the ones she wants to play.