Unschool Monday: letting them do it wrong

Snowflakes #1 and #2 decided to spend some time writing music over the last week, and it's been quite interesting for me to watch them with an unschooling eye as they do this.

 

 

My own  musical education was what you might call reasonably rigorous. I didn't have a tiger mother forcing me to practice four hours a day, but in addition to practicing quite a bit, I did study music theory formally, and take exams where the aim was to score a perfect 100%. I learned how to write melody and harmony according to strict rules (only to find that many well known pieces by both famous classical composers and contemporary songwriters actually don't follow all the rules!). So it has been an interesting exercise in self control to sit back and let the snowflakes have fun experimenting with their compositions.

Here is #2's first attempt. I looked at it trying to figure out what she has learnt, rather than only noticing what is wrong with it: she can differentiate between three different note values (she was talking about crotchets, minims and semibreves as she drew them), she has put in barlines and even a time signature, she knew what pitch some of the notes were, and she liked her piece so much that she added a repeat at the end.

Then she asked me to play it on the piano for her. Since the timing doesn't quite make sense, I interpreted is as a slow, meditative, free flowing piece with pauses and lots of pedal. But that wasn't what she had in mind at all, so she added a drawing of a chicken with some seeds to show that the short notes should be played "like pecking". This gave her brother the ideal opportunity to tell her about staccato dots, as well as various other ideas he remembered, whereupon she grabbed some more manuscript paper and started on her next masterpiece...

It was lovely to watch them working away at it with such energy and concentration, especially when #1 was helping #2. There's no way they would have focused on the task for so long if I had asked them to do it: it was definitely intrinsic motivation in action. Sometimes there's a lot to be learned, by both the snowflakes and me, when I let them 'do it wrong'.