Choir finishes for Fiona next week. She'll be glad it's over I think. She doesn't find it particularly challenging, and being in the mid-to-upper age range of the group (9-13) she gets tired of the slow pace. The director is really good at handling the large-group kid energy, and the overall environment is pretty focused. But my kid was looking for something more similar to the older youth choir her siblings were in. She can't join that for another year and a half, and even then it will depend on how many soprano openings there are that year and the strength of her audition. She really wants to be a part of that ensemble, but I warned her that all the awesomeness that she sees in it right now (as a young 12-year-old craving more challenge amongst the older group her sister is part of) might not end up feeling as awesome as she hopes when she's another two years older. I reminded her that it's the 12-year-old kids in her current choir who will be entering the older group alongside her.
We laughed about her big sister, at age 5, saying "I don't want to go to school in Kindergarten, I want to start in Grade 3, because Grade 3 is awesome" and how I discovered that what she liked about Grade 3 was that it was populated with kids like Paul and Michelle, rather than with agemates like Sadie and Jason. Once she thought it through and realized that her Grade 3 class would have Sadie and Jason in it, that it would just be made up of a slightly older version of the kindergarten classroom she now abhorred, and that she too would be that much older, that was the end of that. Grade 3 seems cool when your 5 but not so much when you're 8.
Yeah, Fiona gets it. But still, she said (and I agree) the older choir is a completely different atmosphere and level of challenge. Last week, for instance, they held a successful rehearsal without their director. Sixty-four teenagers and young adults, together in a large room for almost two hours with a couple of informally anointed leaders from within the group ... and they rehearsed, sang together with great joy and a huge sound, worked on problems, fixed mistakes, tightened things up. Because they love what they can challenge themselves to do.
Anyway, the younger choir finishes up with a set of performances next week, and she'll be pleased to drop it from her roster.
This week she's starting coding club. Basically just a facilitated set of internet-guided lessons in HTML run by a homeschooling parent at a local tech clubhouse. My impression from the organizational emails is that the group is made up of about 50% 12-year-old autism-spectrum boys, and I think Fiona will be fine with that.
Dance is going well. She can only attend two pointe sessions a week rather than the recommended three, and because she's so flexible she needs more strength to counter-balance that, so she has a bunch of exercises she's supposed to be doing in lieu of the third class. Her form is great but her teacher thinks she's at risk for injury if her strength isn't considerably better-than-average. I appreciate the careful preventative approach that's being taken! Next year we'll hopefully be able to get our schedule arranged to support three pointe classes.
We attended a violin master class at the local (village) school earlier this week. The 1st violinist of a visiting string quartet that Fiona's teacher freelances with was giving the class. It was fine; Fiona played her Mozart G Major 1st movement (sans cadenza) and got some good input.
Anyway, because the class was hosted in a little conference room at the school, when we walked through the foyer we saw on the announcement board two events that we wished we had been informed about. I got a little ticked off. One of them was an amazing class on sexual health facilitated by a friend of mine from another community. It happens every year, and I had felt like this was a very opportune year to get Fiona to the class. My older kids had been part of it, and although I work in the field and obviously have the knowledge and understanding, I feel like when you're the child of two physicians and know almost all the other local health care workers on a social level, it's super important to have someone outside that circle to ask questions of, to have as a resource, to get information from. So we arrived at the school to see that we had just missed the session by half an hour.
Our DL program is hosted in this school, and part of the function of the DL teacher has always been to communicate with DL students about special events, field trips, workshops, activities and such that might be of interest to DL students. There has always been a policy that DL students are welcome at any of these things, and it makes sense because give the small number of DL students and their wide age- and ability-range, they can't possibly offer a meaningful range of opportunities specifically to those kids.
So I came home and wrote an email to the teacher and principal of the DL program. Again. Asking if DL students were still welcome at school things, and requesting that parents be notified. Because it wasn't just the sexual health class. There are at least two other things that would have been great for Fiona that we didn't hear about until afterwards, one of which was written right into her learning plan as a request to be involved if/when it happens. I haven't got a response. Whatever. I hope that's because they're both feeling awkward and guilty. I didn't even mention the meeting with parents that they promised to set up to address some of these issues and others. As Fiona said: "DL fail."
Sigh. The current teacher tells me she is retiring from teaching at the end of the year. Fingers crossed that our usual guy will be assigned the DL job again when he returns from sabbatical. If not, we'll definitely have to find something different.
Edited to add: My new interest.... for seem reason I want to start a hydroponic window garden. Either a vertical gravity-fed continuous drip system or deep water culture. So many possible DIY approaches!
Miranda