I must be procrastinating - I've broke one LONG letter into three so far...

Here's some advantages to starting in third grade:
This year I opened up my room two mornings a week from 7:30-7:50 for 4th and 5th graders to continue testing. And the last two years we've had Recorder Club that meets after school. Last year 12 souls of widely varying abilities performed unison and 2 part songs quite well. This year I am in heaven. I limited it to students who passed "Red Bead" - (2nd bead past black belt). I had kind of helped and cajoled most everyone to purple belt last year, most could play up to brown belt by ear, but those who got onto the beads were probably actually reading notes...
And there are between 24-27 proficient musicians showing up on Thursdays this year. I put out 9 music stands and 3 musicians share a folder of music. Half of them play alto (passed 10 belts and 10 beads on soprano), 3 have sopraninos. We started out the year with "A Paris" from their alto book.
We're playing a "Triple" piece from Cak's book, the new arrangement of "Ode to Joy" in Recorder Classroom (the alto part was tricky for a couple weeks), and some fun Recorder Classroom pieces like Zippy Toad for warm-ups. Then they break into groups and are working up a piece to play. I envision a "prism" experience where little groups start playing at different corners of the room.

Yes, our school is a center for gifted students. And many of them not only have "super CPU's" as Martha described them once, but they also are quite talented in Music and love it. Though I do have to admit that last week (week 9) was the first week they sounded like anything on these songs - that's the next post...
Linda Z