woodwind advice

[katiestar]

I have an 8 old DD who is keen to advance from recorder.
We live in a fairly remote location with a small school and there is only 1 child , a clariner playerwho learns through the county music service. So we naturally thought woodwind would be the way tio go.But he told her he wouldn't be able to teach her unless she got together a group of 4 woodwind beginners.The other girl being too advanced to share a class with DD.I am pretty annoyed about this because it must be more cost effective to drive out to our village to teach 2X20 minute sessions than 1 -and I will be pursuing that argument .But in the meantime we have a woodwing teacher who is a neighbour.hE has said her hands are too small for the saxophome which is what she wants to do (but only since we went to see a jazz saxophonist play recently ,before that she wanted to play flute.
However I have had a browse on the net and found that there are alto-sax's adapted for younger children .
I am not really sure what is teh best course of action.She is small for 8 and very slight.
Any advice welcome !

DS wanted to play sax, but hands too small. He is currently learning clarinet (and is picking it up pretty well) and will move to sax when his hands are a bit bigger. Several woodwind teachers/players have said that a clarinet player makes a good sax player, but a sax player finds it harder to have good technique on clarinet.

I have a clarinet so he can play that, once the borrowed clarinet has to be given back, but we will hopefully buy him a full size sax when the time comes.

what a pain about the lesons at school, but the neighbour sounds a good bet - would your DD fancy starting with a clarinet, tghen move over to sax?

I went onto the flute from the recorder, but that was secondary, otherwise could you get her a treble recorder. The fingering is different to a descant so it may give a bit more of challenge.

You can get curly flutes for little people! Our littler people learn the fife.

Thanks for you input.i think probably the answer is to let her have a go on them and see which she prefers.