Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The ultimate brag thread

My 10 year old son with motor dyspraxia, who has taken piano lessons since age 5 but was always reluctant to play in front of other people, did really well at his first piano recital today. He played the Jeopardy theme and Jingle Bells with no mistakes and his timing was really good. I wonder if all the time spent on Rock Band has helped with that.

He even memorized the Jeopardy theme. It is the first time he has ever memorized a song. He never tried before. I had a hard enough time getting him to practice. He would only play if he had the sheet music in front of him. I always wondered if his motor learning disability had something to do with his reluctance to try to memorize a song. He always had such an incredible memory for words, could memorize hundreds of words quickly, but motor memory was a problem and so was the "glitch" that occasionally caused him to play notes with the wrong hand.

He saw that some of the other kids who did not have dyspraxia made mistakes and it was okay. It was fun and that is what it is supposed to be--fun.

I think the piano teacher did the right thing by giving him easier music to play for the recital than he is used to playing in lessons because he now has the confidence to play in front of other people and he is looking forward to playing piano now.

He recently found a Youtube video of someone playing a song called "To Zanarkand" that was from a Final Fantasy video game. He downloaded the sheet music for the song and realized that it was harder than what he had worked on in his lessons but took it to his teacher anyway and asked how long it would be before he could play this song. The song looked like it was at an intermediate level and the piano teacher played it and thought it sounded really nice. She told him if he wanted they could break up the song over several lessons and he could even do it at the next recital if he wanted, so he is really happy about this.

She is a great piano teacher for a twice exceptional kid.

That's a lovely story Lori. I'm so happy for your DS.

That is indeed a great story, Lori. You're absolutely right, music should be fun--glad you've found a great teacher for your son.

We went to get my DH a hair cut and were waiting in the car DD said look a wild bird store. She started asking me if they had wild bird in there and if they were flying all around.

When DH got back I took DD to check it out. She asked the lady if they had any wild birds and was searching around the store. It was pretty cute. We ended up getting a stuffed bird because I'm a sucker.

When we checked out she heard sugar plum fairies on the radio. I could tell she recognized it and asked her what it was. She said sugar plumb fairies. The lady at the counter said how do you know that. She just smiled with her pudgy sticky cheeks. When we got outside she whispered to me its by Petter Tchaikovsky. Every day this child amazes me.

DD5 wears glasses and recently went to have her eye's checked. The eye doctor asked "does she know her letter's" a little bit of a laugh and "yes" So she started testing my daughter on 4 different lines she went over each about 3 or 4 times. I could see what my daughter was doing (she thinks everything has to be learned) she had the lines memorized and was saying the letters with no problem. The eye doctor said "Wow your eyes have really improved"

Had a good one that I have to share.

DS has been continuing his interest is math (add, subtract) in various bases. Binary and hex are his favorites, but basically he'll do math operations in any arbitrary base... Had to explain to him that base one google would be tough because we'd run out of symbols

At any rate, I figured I'd show him a little bit about converting between bases to help reinforce the idea that they are equivalent numbers, just different representations of the same value. I showed him the mechanics of converting from a given base to base ten by using powers... (e.g. 2^3 x 1 + 2^2 x 0 + 2^1 x 0 + 2^0 x 1 converts binary) Binary is easy because he knows his 2 "powers" up pretty high. Then we did something in base 3 and he seemed to get the mechanics of it pretty well. Then he said--and this is what I thought was the really, really cool--he said "okay, I want to convert from base 10 to base 10 to see if it's congruent." At first I thought I misheard him! In this sense, congruent is actually a reasonable word to use.

So he then worked out how 231 is equal to 2 x 10^2 + 3 x 10^1 + 1 x 10^0. (he needed a little help, but he was darn close).

Later he wanted to do something in base 11, but melted down and went to bed with only having half a dinner so no dinner-time math.

But still. Love the math and vocabulary.

JB

Wow, JB, every time you tell a story about your son, I'm just blown away! What a fantastic kid! And it sounds like he's so lucky to have you, too--how wonderful that you're showing him all this fun stuff.

Thanks minniemarx. It ebbs and flows and he's definitely in a "blow you socks off" cycle at the moment.

What really got me is that last weekend was when he first encountered the word congruent on a geometry worksheet. Seeing him applying this word (largely correctly) in a math setting was a small window into his mind...

Back to Wikipedia because I need to bone up on math concepts!

JB

I'm following JBDad to Wikipedia so I can understand what his son was doing. I thought I had a good grasp of math before reading
It left me scratching my head going "Huh?"

DD6 was doing Logic Safari today and loving it. It led to a good discussion about the importance of checking your answer at the end to make sure it agrees with the given facts.

Didn't want to get too, too technical in my first post. If you had a binary number (base 2) of 1001, then to convert that to base 10, it'd be

(1 x 23) + (0 x 22) + (0 x 21) + (1 x 10)

Where the exponent becomes the "pattern" for the place value. This is my guess on why DS has such an affinity for this algorithm. If you were doing something crazy like base 5, then the number of 4315 would be expressed as

(4 x 52) + (3 x 51) + (1 x 50)

That sort of thing. I left out the actual binary number I used in the example. Sorry if that was confusing. Wikipedia has a good example for any given base number. Found a few pointers for when the topic comes up again...

JB

P.S. Also a lot easier to post after figuring out how to superscript/subscript on the forum.