Shuya turns 10

Shuya just turned 10 recently and we had a nice little birthday party for her at the Rec Center. We hired an Art Teacher who provided all the kids with instruction on how to make Christmas Cards with some unique materials. It was really great. We ordered Marco's Pizza delivered and everybody made 3 or 4 Christmas cards to bring home and to send to friends and family.

Shuya attended Broomfield Academy for Kindergarten because we could not get her into a public school due to her birth date. She received an excellent education there from an incredible teacher.   She was identified as gifted and talented with an IQ score of 136 by her school district in 2011.  She has been enrolled at one of the best elementary schools in Colorado since Kindergarten (she repeated Kindergarten there but was quickly advanced to First Grade).

She is an excellent pianist and has been studying since she was 4. She has been taking lessons from a very good teacher for a couple of years now and is really excelling.  Her piano teacher thinks she is musically gifted.  Her mom makes sure she practices at least an hour a day which is one of the reasons she is so good - but her natural ability to learn, and her love of music, and natural musical talent are also real assets. She has had several recitals and has been competing. She competed recently at the Colorado Rising Stars Festival, Schmitt Music Competition and tried out for a spot in the Boulder Bach Festival. She is preparing a concerto piece (Sonatina by Clementi Op 36) to compete for an opportunity to play with the Denver Orchestra in May, 2016.  Here's a link to a piece she worked on a more recently (circa September 2015):

Sonatina in D Major Allegro by Musio Clementi

She also likes to sing and is taking voice lessons and sings at recitals at the Rocky Mountain Center for Music and Arts in Lafayette, CO.  She loves to perform on stage!  She does not have any fear of performing in public! 

Blanket of Kindness

She takes art lessons and her art tutor has also said that she thinks she is very creative and has commented that Shuya often tries to depict 3-Dimensional scenes or use 3-D techniques. Karen is an excellent teacher and can work with all kinds of media so Shuya is learning a lot of different art forms.  In March, 2015, Shuya won a Gold medal from the National PTA Reflections Art Program for her artwork “A Blanket of Kindness” at the Colorado State level. 

She is very athletic as well as intelligent. She is on the Broomfield CUDA swim team where she competes in numerous competitions. She also takes Chinese Kung Fu and is a favorite of the Shifu. She likes swimming, riding a bike or scooter, roller skating, baseball, basketball and soccer. I just took her skiing for the first time and she loved it. We are preparing to get her ski lessons soon.

Shuya has traveled quite a bit. She has been to China several times to visit family. She has also been to New York City where she got to see "Spiderman" on Broadway. She went to Washington DC one Fourth of July and got to see the fire works over the National Mall from our hotel window in the JW Marriott. She went to the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. She visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and one of the Art museums. She's also been to Virginia, Minnesota, Ohio, Vancouver, Canada, and Cape Cod. The Cape is one of her favorite destinations where she gets to play with her cousins on the beach and swim in the ocean.

She has also been to southern California near LA (where her father works) a few times where she has gone to many local attractions like Disneyland,  The LA Zoo, Legoland, Knott’s Berry Farm, San Diego Zoo, the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the Southern California Science Museum (where she saw the Space Shuttle), and Universal Studios.

Shuya is doing very well academically. She is good at math and science and she wants to learn more about space and computer programming this year.  She finished 5^th grade intensive practice from Singapore Math this summer. She is working on the 6^th grade Singapore Math. She is a voracious reader - she can't put a book down. And she loves all kinds of electronic games - Minecraft is her current favorite.Her goal is to reach 1000 reading counts points this year. She also has passion for writing. She keeps a private diary. She is also writing a poem and a story. She wishes she could publish her own best-selling book one day.

Shuya has a great personality. She is usually irrepressible. She is almost always very happy but when things don’t go her way she cries. She can become frustrated while playing the piano if she hears anything that sounds like criticism and she will shut down and sometimes start crying.  She is very outgoing and often tries to make new friends but although she has many friends at school and in her neighborhood, she has very few close friends and complains that she is having trouble making friends at school.  She has bonded very closely with her parents but seems to have trouble forming close bonds with kids at school.  Maybe due to her younger age, she is being picked on by some older kids in her classes. We worked with the school psychologist last year to help her to cope with social, emotional and behavioral issues. We will continue supporting her and will seek help from the school when needed.

Sunset over the Rockies from our house.