1st Violin Lesson…

Tobias has been back at school for 1.5weeks now. He is now in Zweite Klasse (2nd Grade or Primary 2) and he is still loving school as much as before. He still has 2 long days at school and 3 mornings. He still goes to Judo.

BUT… he no longer goes for swimming classes – he got the last badge in July! So he is officially water-safe. 😀 Very proud of him!

NEW… He had his very first violin lesson, just yesterday. It was only  25 minutes, half of which was spent learning the basics such as how to hold the violin and bow, what the strings are called etc… His teacher, Herr Steiner, also had to tune his violin, which he reassured me would not need re-tuning for a while after this.

After the introductory stuff, he went on to learn to pluck the strings with his finger. i believe it is called playing open strings. It was fun to watch. The teacher sang the name of an animal, first letter of the name corresponded to a string (G,D,E,A), such as Giraffe, in a specific rhythm and Tobias was to follow on the correct string, in the correct rhythm. After a couple of rounds of plucking, he was allowed to try doing the same thing with the bow, making sure he only plays that one string.

Herr Steiner told me he is doing great for a first lesson. Tobias’ homework is to practice plucking and bowing with those animal names and also to come up with 3 more animals for each string. What a laugh it was, when we came home and had to crack our heads thinking of animal names in German that begin with G, D, E and A. This is not something they teach at adult German classes or use in daily life and Tobias’ vocabulary isn’t quite big enough yet. So we went on the internet, looked through dictionaries and his little kiddy books and finally came up with 3 animals for each string; G was the hardest to find.

Tobias loved his lesson and looks forward to practising. Mummy looks forward to him playing nice little pieces on the violin in months to come 😉

See here for how Tobias decided on learning the violin and see here for how happy he was to collect his violin.

syc