Rooty-Tooty Devil’s Flutes

A couple of weeks ago I put the final nail in the coffin of my sanity. I started a recorder club. Not just Daniel, but two of his friends, accompanied by various younger siblings. 

Let me be clear: this is not learning to use electronic recording devices. We are talking about rooty-tooty devil’s flutes, the small plastic instruments of torture that have been the scourge of primary school parents for generations. 

I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that I really like the recorder. Lots of people don’t realise that it is actually a ‘proper’ instrument but if you listen to Renaissance and Baroque music (think Bach, Telemann, Corelli) it features heavily. If you don’t believe me, go and YouTube it now! Or to save you the trouble, have a look here. You’re welcome. 

Of course, a beautifully played wooden Baroque recorder is a rather different beastie to the overblown screech whistle most of us are familiar with. But as a beginner instrument, I honestly think it takes some beating. Actually getting a sound out of it to start with is pretty easy so there is an instant result for a small child, and then they can focus on learning fingering and notation and so on. Learning a simple instrument is a good vehicle for tackling early theory (e.g. reading music), which is then transferrable to any other instrument, and many of the techniques used on the recorder are integral to at least the rest of the woodwind and some brass. 

And then, let’s face it, a recorder is the cockroach of the music world - widely detested, largely misunderstood, and absolutely indestructible. No matter how exuberant or heedless the child, or how many ‘accidents’ long-suffering family members are driven to engineer, it is virtually impossible to damage a recorder. How you feel about this will depend on your perspective but I like that it can be left around for the kids to pick up and have a go at frequent intervals rather than having to schedule formal practice sessions. It is also helpful not having to worry that the baby will get his hands (and mouth) on them. 

The only similarly robust instrument I can think of is the piano, which has the downside of being a very lonely experience at the beginner stage. Recorders can be played in groups - although whether they SHOULD is a point heavily contested by attendees of primary school concerts. 

So a few weeks ago I mentioned to the boys that I was thinking of trying them with the recorder (mostly Daniel, of course, but Adam always wants to join in). They weren’t quite sure what I meant so I fetched an innocuous-looking brown box from their shelves. I don’t think they had even noticed it before, sitting innocently under other things on one of the higher shelves. With the air of a conjuror, I opened the box to reveal a whole collection of recorders, tin whistles, and other tooty-blowy things. 

As an aside, because it’s my blog and I can digress if I want to, we also discovered an ancient artifact from my childhood: a battered and tarnished brass car horn with its rubber bulb gone. This came from the Beaulieu Motor Museum at some point in my dim and distant past, and was used to let us know dinner was ready (to save my mum bellowing across two acres of garden and the large field next door). When the bulb expired we took it off and just blew the thing instead, which produced a noice similar to the mating call of a large tanker. Needless to say, the boys were delighted with it and were most disappointed that I limited their time with it lest our garden should be invaded by a fleet of amorous container ships. We may live further inland than I grew up but we’re still not that far from the coast. Also, I like our neighbours and would quite like to maintain our good relationship. 

Back to the recorders. 

We invited a couple of friends to come and learn with us, did a bit of investigation into books and chose Recorder From the Beginning. I also got a couple of grade books for myself to remind me, since I don’t think I had played for about 20 years, and invested in a reasonably decent recorder for myself, the boys having commandeered the Aulos descants that belonged to me and my brother. This is what our sitting room looked like - three adults, three 5/6 year olds, four 2/3 year olds (one was borrowed), and two 6 month olds. 

I will leave you to imagine the noise. But after 20-30 minutes we had actually managed to cover the concept of tonguing (the older three are particularly good at this), how to play a B, where it lives on the stave, and they had all managed to make up a funny phrase and play it (i.e. play different rhythms). Not bad going! Then we sent them off to play, hid the recorders, and drank lots of coffee. 

Session two, over a fortnight later, revealed that all three older children still remembered how to play the B, what it was called, and where it lived on the stave! I was mightily impressed. We have now introduced A, looked at where that lives, and learned to recognise/say/play quaver and crotchet rhythms using the words ‘window’ and ‘door’. Don’t ask, it works. They’ll probably still be using those words when they take Music degrees. 

In the process of trying to sound like I know what I’m talking about, I have got myself completely hooked. Originally I am a violinist but I barely ever play these days because there is never enough time to get it out, and you can’t just drop it onto a table and leave it while you go and sort out World War 3 or a screaming baby. 

It turns out, however, that 3 years of music at university and a brief foray into the clarinet during A Levels (I was working on Grade 8 when I gave up) is a pretty solid foundation for relearning the recorder after a couple of decades. Having said that, it must have been pretty firmly embedded somewhere in my memory because it was the only instrument I played until I was 10 and I seem to remember I was a constant member of my school recorder club from around 6 until I left primary school. Even after I left my recorder teacher persuaded me to go to a couple of adult recorder groups (no, take your minds out of the gutter!), which I really enjoyed. One of them is still running, I have discovered, and I am planning to go after the summer. In the meantime, to keep me busy, I am working on some Grade 5 exam pieces. The descant syllabus only goes up to Grade 5 so I think I might take that next term before I crack out my old treble recorder and continue torturing the family in a lower key. 

Finding our New Normal

Since we got back from Israel, our home ed has shifted once again. This is something every home educator - and every parent - will recognise. You get into a rhythm that works and then BAM! someone has a massive developmental leap and/or hormone surge and you have to flail about until you find the new normal. We have managed to avoid too much flailing this time, thanks to it all coinciding with our trip away, thus giving us time away from the old routine (I use that word in its loosest possible sense) and space to observe, discuss and plan ready for our return. 

Reading Eggs and Maths Seeds have stayed. These make my life a huge amount easier so I am extremely grateful that Daniel loves them! For those not in the know, they are online programmes that take the child from the very beginning in reading and maths through to the standard levels for age 7 (RE) and age 9 (MS). There is a follow-on programme, Reading Eggspress, for reading at 7+. Each lesson takes somewhere around half an hour and uses games and animated characters to teach the material. Each game has to be passed before you can move on to the next one, and at the end of each ‘map’ (10 lessons in RE, 5 in MS), there is a quiz that must be passed before you can go on to the next one. You earn ‘eggs’ for each game that can be spent in the online shop to buy virtual furniture etc for a house with a little character, though Daniel has largely lost interest in that side of it (he was a bit obsessed for a while but calmed down when we introduced the rule that he could only go to the shop at the end of each map). As an added bonus, the programme sends me regular emails with a progress report so I have a record of what he has done and when; he doesn’t see these, nor the ‘estimated reading age’, but they are interesting for me to see and could be useful if our education provision were ever questioned. 

Anyway... after starting Reading Eggs at the end of last August, he is now on the final map and busy planning what we will do to celebrate finishing it. He will have a go at reading most things now, though has yet to tackle a whole book, but that will come. Maths Seeds he started in January and is now somewhere around the middle of Year 1. He is still finding it quite easy and often decides to do two lessons in a day so by September I expect he will have ‘caught up’ with where he would be if he were in school. I am impressed with how solid his grasp of basic number concepts is and love how excited he is by manipulating numbers just for the sake of it, not just in a practical context. Practical maths is obviously important (he is starting to tell the time and recognise coins, for example) but I also want him to appreciate the beauty of numbers in pure maths, and I am glad to see this programme encouraging that. 

So now to the new things. After years of fiercely resisting any kind of writing or even drawing, Daniel has suddenly started drawing, colouring, and even giving writing a go. At first it was just in birthday cards but gradually it has increased until he was happy to accept my suggestion that we look at how to write each letter correctly (his upside-down e’s were frustrating him). I gave him a choice of using the old write-and-wipe books or worksheets and he chose worksheets, so I have downloaded a free set and he is cheerfully working his way through the alphabet. 

Then there is Hebrew, with the Z’man Likro textbook I have used with many of my Bar Mitzvah students. He already knew the alphabet thanks to a story book we got him in the US 18 months ago, and now he is making great progress putting the letters together with the nekudot (vowels) and learning some very basic vocabulary. 

For the last year or so, Daniel has been desperate to learn Italian. We’re not entirely sure what inspired this interest (possibly a combination of Peppa Pig and the Go Jetters) but he has been impressively insistant about it. We briefly found a class that he loved, but it stopped for lack of numbers. An attempt to set up a home ed class with the same teacher failed for the same reason (we might try again in September). In the meantime, therefore, we are going to have a go at ten minutes each day of the Duolingo app. 

Finally, it felt like time to introduce some sort of music education. That deserves a post of its own. 

We don’t do all these things every day, of course - we are far too busy living life and enjoying all the activities summer offers. Perhaps 3-4 days most weeks we are doing at least some, aiming for a balance over the space of each week. Daniel seems much more settled and happy, and he and Adam fight much less, when he has had some time and space doing work. 

Of course, Adam is now asking to do ‘work’ too, so our new normal is about to change again to accommodate that, but for Daniel we seem to have found what works. For now, anyway!