My first student: already composing

My daughter (age 5) took piano lessons and Music Mind Games from Michiko Yurko (the creator of MMG).  This, along with my work teaching Suzuki piano, is what led me to go to a week long training in Music Mind games.  Which in turn allowed me to understand how a similar method and materials could be used to teach Byzantine chant theory.

To get to the point, I developed the Parallage Phrases with my daughter in mind and have tested them on her every once in a while.  So, in that way, she is my first student even though we haven't had very formal lessons yet.

My daughter with her composition

We went through the first 10 or 15 phrases a handful of times this past winter, but hadn't looked at the materials for months.  Recently she saw a Byzantine chant textbook on the couch and became interested again.  We were going on a long car trip last weekend, so I sat in the back seat with her and we reviewed the scale.  What she was really interested in were the Parallage Phrases though.  (It's interesting to me that so far the kids seem to be really excited about chanting with ni, pa, vou, but most adults I know dread it.)

Amazingly enough, she made it to phrase 20 without too much difficultly!  Afterwards, she asked me for a piece of paper and a pencil.  She started composing in Byzantine notation, all on her own, without any prompting from me!  I taped the tail end of it, because I thought it was so interesting to hear her vocalize what she was writing.  I love hearing her say "down 2" like it's no big deal; even though she just learned the symbol 15 minutes ago!

After she finished her composition in Byzantine notation, we chanted it together.  I taped that too, but I will forego posting it here.  After we chanted it once she added the tone key at the beginning and the end.   I suggested that we add tone keys in the middle too.  She liked the idea so we chanted it again and she added tone keys at the end and beginning of each line.  She changed a few symbols in the middle because we were getting too high and she even knew to erase the tone key at the end of the music because it might be different.  

Here is her finished composition.  It's amazing what children are capable of doing!