The Life and Times of James and Sara: Violin Lessons and Catan

This was supposed to be a toes picture.
Anna and Lily have identical toes - long pinky toes
that are just like their Daddy's.
I had both girls on my lap and snapped a picture.

Yesterday was the start of violin teaching in Florida! My two students arrived at 2pm and had their lessons for a half hour each. Actually I went over time with both of them, so poor Mrs. Alexander had to stay until 3:30pm. There is a lot to cover when you are learning how to pick up a violin for the first time and learning what strings are which and everything! I had to do some cramming to review what to teach a rank beginner yesterday morning. There is a lot I had forgotten in my three-year teaching hiatus. The nervousness I felt yesterday before we started reminded me of when someone asked to take lessons from me in NC - I had only been taking violin for two years at the time and I had no idea how to teach an instrument. I am glad for a detailed Suzuki method book that pretty much walks you through it! As I teach, all the instructions Katie Lawton poured into me come back to mind. It is like taking her lessons again to remember it all. It makes me enthused about my own violin playing too.

I have so many ideas of what we could do with our new students - playing at the nursing home, touring the violin shop, going to a PCC Master's concert for violin, going to a concert, playing in the strings ensemble at church, finding a local violin teacher and doing a group class with her students so my girls can see other players, and doing a group lesson with the two girls, James and I with quartet music (I have a resident cello player in James). I'm sure more ideas will come to mind - I am excited about starting lessons again.

It will be great to have Lily grow up with music and music instruction in our home. She will see the value in good music, possibly be inspired to learn an instrument, see good examples of hard work in practice, have older girls as an example to look up to, get to be around Mrs. Alexander and Mrs. Harvey, and she can't be the center of attention during lesson time.

One student's bow hold was so perfect,
I had to take a picture.

Emily called and set up supper and a game of Catan here with them and Adam Mitchell. Supper was good and the game was great. It was the craziest game of Catan I have ever played! You could technically say there were four winners of that one game. Steve reached the victory point goal first, but we raised the goal to 15 and kept playing. Then James would have won if he had noticed that he had all the points before Steve took a point away from him. So James was the second winner. Then I had a massive handful of knight Development Cards that would have gotten me the largest army card from James and made me win, but I wasn't allowed to play them due to a "house rule." I count that I was the third winner. Then eventually James won for real with 15 victory points. It was a three hour game!