Gifted

Children

You can identify children with a musical gift because they are preoccupied with music. They have a sense of melody, measure, rhythm and patterns and can sing songs in tune. They can play songs by ear and invent melodies.

Other characteristics

Almost always music in the background (whistling, humming)
Sensitive to sounds (birds, bells from afar, traffic)
Rhythm in the language (rhymes)
Mnemonics to remember something
Melodic accents in oral language (voice inflections, tone, intonation, tempo)
A musical child can often lively read out loud

Talent and / or (high) giftedness is now recognized and acknowledged. At school, it is difficult to find the right balance between sufficient challenge and a good connection with other children. While a child can be two years ahead of it’s peers, he is far too young to play with the big kids. Despite enrichment and deepening in his own group, he probably isn’t challenged enough. The danger is that he becomes demotivated, adapts and will be underachieving.

Violin lessons

To learn to play violin provides an excellent level of challenge that is not bound to age. The violin is a complex instrument that requires daily exercise, even for a talented or (high) gifted student. As the violin lessons are adapted to the personal development, it activates and encourages the student’s cognitive skills. This benefits the overall school performance in the long term.

Annemarie is also gifted. From experience and from her fascination with talented and gifted, she has done a lot of research in that area. With her understanding attitude and structural approach she found the right way to address (high) gifted and talented students and how to encourage them.

Background Annemarie

Born into a musical family, father and mother were both musicians, Annemarie was given every opportunity to develop her gift. As a child she sang a lot and experimented extensively on the piano. When she was seven she started out just like her big sister with the violin. She got the Suzuki method taught by Stieneke Voorhoeve-Poot. Annemarie went through the method books very quickly, so they barely two years after her first violin lesson she auditioned for the young talent department of the Royal Conservatory. There she got excellent and thorough lessons with Qui of Woerdekom. As a teenager, Annemarie decided to stop playing violin to pursue a different life. Among other things, she had a firm in ICT in which she programmed database applications, built websites and managed computersystems. Eight years later she picked up her instrument again and after half a year of preparation time she was accepted for education at the Utrecht Conservatory. There she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. Annemarie discovered her giftedness (after years of suspicions) in 2013.