Ukulele Challenge Week 3

This week started off really well. We practiced on Wednesday night after school without any repetition of the statement that my son hated music. On Thursday my children went to their Grandma’s for tea and so he had a night off practice, but he played with absolutely no fuss on Friday night. Pretty much the whole of Saturday was taken over by Frozen fever as Frozen II came out on Disney + the day before (my son had said he would wake up extra early on Friday morning to watch it before any of the rest of us got up, but that didn’t quite happen). I managed to convince him to practice a little on Sunday by getting him to play for his Grandma, and my youngest decided she wanted to get her “keker” out to play too.

We didn’t do so well on Monday though, as my son complained of a stomach ache all day at school so he came home early. Although once he got home he was clearly absolutely fine as evidenced by the running around and shrieking like a mad thing with his sister just before tea!

Progress made: we have been practising chord changes and strumming to the beat, developing his sense of pulse which is so important in playing music (it has a lot of other developmental benefits as well, but that is a subject for another post another day). He is starting to hold the ukulele better, straighter. He puts his finger next to the string a lot of the time rather than pressing down on the string so we talk regularly about how the string needs to be able to move to make a nice sound, demonstrating how putting his finger next to the string stops it from moving and vibrating, so deadening the sound. He is taking this in and is producing a better sound than he was this time last week.

We concentrated mostly on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and today we started looking at Baa Baa Black Sheep. This starts with exactly the same chord pattern as Twinkle Twinkle for the first couple of bars, which my son noticed. He had to learn a new chord, G, in order to play this song so he has added a new chord to his musical belt.

Plan for next week: the school term finishes on Thursday this week. He will be off school for 8 weeks. We will need to establish our school holiday routine, which will be very flexible. And I promised him that he could stay at his Grandma’s house, just him without his sister so he gets some 1 to 1 attention, in the first week. So I don’t expect us to make too much progress. Just sticking to playing for 10 minutes most days, and practising the 2 songs he has learned so far.