The No-Television Experiment, Day 28

I have a hard time getting rid of books.  Actually, I have a hard time not acquiring new books constantly.  I first realized this when I was berated by my father (who has a substantial home library himself) for "collecting books" at the age of sixteen because I wanted to buy a Romanian-English dictionary from a used bookstore during a trip to India that I took with him.

For the last few years I have had to serious control my book-acquiring obsession because our apartment isn't big enough to hold any more (our self-storage unit is nearly full, too).  Now, four weeks into our No-Television Experiment, I have realized the need to be even more careful about what I acquire--and to pare down our current collection--for another reason: indiscriminate collecting is not conducive to our educational aims.  

I've recently begun to dread our visits to the local public library because I know that when Sebastian and Serena walk in through the door of the children's department they are going to be surrounded with wonderful books--nearly all in English!  I estimate that close to 99% of our library's children's collection is in English, even though about 20% of Lewiston's population is French-speaking and at least 10% speaks other languages, including a large number of Somali immigrants.  When the children are not with me, I go straight to the one mostly-French bookcase and make the majority of my selections from there.  But the children, of course, do not limit themselves to one tiny corner of the room, and they come out with twenty-nine English-language books and perhaps one or two French titles (there are only a couple of Chinese-language titles in the entire children's department) each time.

Our home library is somewhat better, with about 80% English-language titles, but I'd like to make the proportions even more balanced--about 40% English, 40% French, and 20% Chinese for now (a larger proportion of Chinese later, I hope, once I'm better able to handle Chinese characters).  This is not easy to achieve when everything that we see in local stores and at summer garage sales and library sales is in English. I have to work hard to find our French and Chinese books online, while the English ones seem to appear out of nowhere, taking up all my precious space (and my children's reading time) whenever I let my guard down.

A few days ago I did some serious weeding of English books from the kids' bookshelves.  I'm beginning to resign myself to the fact that life is too short to read every book ever printed, and although I don't censor my children's reading material (I even read a completely meaningless "Transformers" book to Sebastian once, just because he wanted to read it) I have to be selective about what I keep in the house if I want them to have time to read the best books available in Chinese, French, and English.  So I went through the children's bookshelves and donated everything in English that was badly written or illustrated, that the kids didn't like, that I didn't like (unless the kids really loved it), that was commercially written or illustrated, that we had a duplicate (in better condition) of, or that was significantly damaged (unless irreplaceable).  I brought several large boxes of books to the Salvation Army store down the road, and now we have some half-empty shelves just waiting to be filled up with French and Chinese books.  The children have discovered some treasures (in all three languages) that were previously buried under all the junk, too.

My father will be bringing some new French additions to our collection with him when he comes to Maine next month--books that I ordered from Amazon.ca and had shipped to my sister Margaret in Toronto (free Super-Saver Shipping within Canada!) and that she brought to Pennsylvania with her when she went to visit Dad and my sister Darby there.  In the meantime, I am still looking for high-quality French picture books and simple Chinese picture books and would love to hear any recommendations!

The No-Television Experiment, Day 13

The children have four good-quality recorders in their toy box, and for at least a year I've been meaning to start teaching Sebastian and Serena how to play, but since I haven't played myself since my ninth-grade year in Istanbul, I've kept putting it off.  Well, this Monday, after several hours of playing with some cardboard boxes in the back yard with Serena, Sebastian came into the living room looking for something to do.  This is the time of day when I used to say he could put on a DVD--when he seemed to have exhausted his creativity for the day and we were all a bit tired an impatient.  Since there was no TV this time (he hasn't even asked this week), he went over to the basket of books that we keep in a corner of the living-room floor and picked out a recorder book that I'd picked up at a garage sale or a thrift store on some long-forgotten weekend, brought it over to me, and said happily, "Let's play recorder!"

I've been wanting to start him on an instrument since he turned three last summer.  He's loved violin music since he was a baby, and just after this third birthday my friend Francie gave him a few lessons during a week-long visit (and again when we visited her for her wedding celebration in Newfoundland), which he adored, so last fall I embarked on a several-month-long journey to find him a teacher.  

I finally found someone who was willing to teach violin to such a young child, but Sebastian didn't respond to her like he did to Francie.  He found her intimidating and refused to try anything she suggested, hiding behind my legs and making funny faces until we decided to call it off until he was older (or, I thought to myself, until I could find him a teacher with whom he'd feel more comfortable).  I grew up playing piano and would like to teach him to play piano, too, but I don't currently have one in the house.  For now, I am happy that, because of the No-Television Experiment, we have finally started learning to play the recorder together.  

I was pretty good at the recorder as a child, by the admittedly low standards of school recorder-playing.  In my school in Istanbul, all we did in music class all year long was play the flûte à bec, and the teacher (who once got hit in the forehead by a flying piece of recorder belonging to one of my classmates) used to have me demonstrate every new piece to the class before they attempted to play in a cacophony of squeaks and squeals (I guess that says something for the quality of Canadian music education).  Okay, the competition was basically nil, but, still, I was a decent recorder player and enjoyed playing.

I found out only much later that the recorder is not just a toy instrument invented for the purpose of helping children to make lots of noise at school but a serious instrument with a long history and the capability to produce beautiful music (see Jim Phypers's recorder website for a brief historical overview and some nice recordings of recorder music to start out with).  It remains an excellent first instrument for a child because the basics are uncomplicated and because it's practically indestructible and very inexpensive to buy or replace; a high-quality instrument can be had online for $20 or less. 

Our first three days of "lessons" (all initiated by Sebastian) have been a lot of fun.  Sebastian has learned the proper method for "tongueing" and knows how to play the notes "B" and "A."  The only problem is that his hands are a bit small to cover all the holes simultaneously; perhaps a sopranino recorder (the smallest type) would work better for him until he gets a little bigger, but if I try that I will have to find a sopranino method since the notes are not the same as on a regular (soprano) recorder.  

There are six basic types of recorder: in addition to the sopranino (or descant) and soprano, which are the smallest and highest-pitched, there exist alto (or treble), tenor, bass, and contra-bass varieties.  Others, including the 8-to-9-foot-tall sub-contrabass, are less commonly played (not to mention expensive).  

I have, of course, already taught my children to say "flûte à bec."  Now that we've gotten over our first recorder-playing hurdle--getting started--I figure I might as well make this another opportunity to learn some French, which shouldn't be too hard since I had that entire year of French scholastic recorder-playing in Istanbul.  I've been trying to refresh my memory as to the relevant vocabulary, and I can already see that learning to play the recorder in French will be rich in new vocabulary for the kids.  

First there are the names of the musical notes, which do not go by the letters of the alphabet (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) as in English but use the solfège system (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do).  There will be the names of the individual fingers and of the note and rest lengths (my favourite is the quarter rest, called the "soupir," or sigh, in French).  And of course there will be lots of verbs, such as "hold," "play," "cover," "uncover," "move," "wait," "start," "repeat," and so on, most of which will be useful in other everyday conversations, too.  I am especially anxious to add more verbs to the kids' French vocabulary, since they currently know mostly nouns and set phrases.

I have found some helpful websites by searching on Google.fr (France) and Google.ca (Canada).  My favourite so far is a site called: Flûtalors from Quebec, which is nicely organized with audio demonstrations and traditional French children's songs to play with each new note that is introduced.  If anyone finds something even better (in French or another language), please feel free to post the link(s) here!

There are also a large number of recorder-method books available in French for those who would like to combine their children's musical education with a French-immersion experience (the amount of text is probably small enough to be manageable even to parents who aren't fluent speakers/readers of the language).  These vary from compilations of the same old pieces that you played on the recorder in elementary school to international compilations; methods based on African, Middle Eastern, or Celtic folk tunes; and rock and jazz methods.  Actually, I think recorder methods are one area in which there are a greater variety of books available in French than in English, although we English speakers do have Harry Potter for Recorder. 

I'm off to play some more flûte à bec.  More no-television and recorder-playing updates coming soon!