"Is my child ready to start music lessons?" This is a question I hear all the time as a music teacher. It's a good question. How do we know if our child is ready for lessons? There are many factors involved but I am going to touch on 3 things to consider before starting. First, can your child focus for short periods of time on a task. It can literally be 30-60 seconds at first. What I’ve found is that…
Happy New Year! I'm excited to start a new series on the blog this month about different ages and stages and how they affect practice, communication with students and children, and how to help music students thrive at each of these developmental stages (preschool - high school). Before launching into the new year I wanted to highlight the top resources of 2017 from the Suzuki Triangle Blog in cased you missed any: Free Resources: Ebook: What You Practice Today is…
Part of the process for me is coming up with list of favorites for the year, related to teaching. There is even a favorite from The Suzuki Triangle Community included as well. I hope you’ll share one of your 2017 favorite resources or memories in the comments below!
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In many studios, there is a week or two around the holidays with no formal lessons. It is always discouraging to come back at the start of the year and feel like progress has been lost and we have to spend a few weeks catching back up to where we were again after winter break. Don't let this happen to you! In an ideal world you can see this break from lessons as a time to share music with visiting…
Thanks to readers in the Suzuki Triangle Community for sharing your ideas and helping this list take shape! See which rule didn’t make the cut at the end of the list!
This is the time of year when it’s easy to get focused on the new year coming up.
We tend to take stock of the year: What were our goals this year? What did we accomplish? What are our goals for the coming year?
It’s a process I love and encourage you to try.
But today I want to talk about something else.
Something that we can lose sight of in the shuffle of all the holidays and all the reflecting we do this time of year.
There are still 33 days left of this year at the time I am writing this article. That’s just over 9% of the year that’s still left.
33 days is plenty of time to: improve a skill, complete a month long practice challenge, or prepare for an upcoming performance. There is still time to make real progress before the year is over and finding a fun way to keep momentum going is really important during this busy time of year.
It’s too early to throw in the towel and decide we’ve accomplished all that we’re going to this year.
Last week’s article was all about skills that young children learn in Suzuki ECE classes (Read it here). It created lots of discussion about what parents also learn over the course of attending classes with their children. So, today we’re talking all about the benefit of SECE classes for parents!
When parents ask what the best thing for them to do to get their young child ready for lessons is, I always recommend these classes to them – they really are the best way to prepare for the instrumental studio.
And that’s not only true for the students.
SECE is also the best way to prepare as a parent for your child to begin music lessons.
It can’t go without being said that SECE classes develop so much more than music readiness skills, as you’ll see from the points below.
As Suzuki taught us “Charactor first, ability second” and that is reflected in all we do in classes each week.
We are developing musical skills, language skills, and small motor skills (to name a few) but even more so, we are developing wonderful people with empathy, sensitivity, and the ability to treat people and instruments in class with care.
That parents in class develop the concepts below, is both a natural consequence of the class, and also something we quite deliberately work to help develop as teachers. Parents start to discover these concepts through the things we say as teachers, careful observation of their child through our example, and through the journaling process at the end of each class.
SECE really is an amazing source of development for children and for us, as their parents.
The longer I teach Suzuki ECE classes the more amazed I am by all that children ages 0-3 (and their parents) are learning from week to week. There are so many amazing moments of seeing a children grasp a new concepts during each class! Below are some of the most striking examples of skills children are developing in SECE classes. You can read them below and also I've made a word art printable of them that you can get by…
Teaching Suzuki Early Childhood Education (or SECE) classes is truly one of the highlights of my week. The development in the children we work with happens literally before our eyes and there’s no doubt that music is having a wonderfully positive impact on both the students and families.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a parent in a SECE class? How young is too young to start attending? What might your child get out of Suzuki ECE that sets it apart from other programs?
I am excited today to share an interview with a parent in our SECE program who started attending classes with her daughter when she was just 7 weeks old.
At the time of this interview, Summer is just over two years old. I was excited to ask Heather, her mom, about their experience in the program, how it has impacted Summer over these past two years and why SECE is still an important part of their lives two years later.
Enjoy!
Heather: At around a month old, Summer could be quite fussy and I noticed when we would go out around others it seemed to help comfort her. We went to a musical instrument themed play date at a friend’s house and after Summer cried for twenty minutes solid in the car, the door to the house opened and a clear triangle sounded out. Summer stopped crying and was interested and content as she listened to the other simple instruments.
On our first day of Suzuki ECE class, Summer was 7 weeks old. She heard the instruments and quietly listened and took it all in.
I could tell each week that she had a lot to think about from class. She was unable to stay awake the entire class time or needed feeding intermittently but we could step out or sit to the side of the room while she napped.
It’s truly amazing to me that it didn’t matter what her mood was like earlier in the day or in the car, when class started she listened and thought. As she got older, she became more aware of and interested in her classmates too.
Have you heard of Martha Yasuda’s wonderful arrangements for strings?
I use them all the time for fun duets, to help prepare students to play with an accompanist before rehearsals and recitals, and for note reading with older students as they work on their ensemble skills or to play duets with younger students in group class.
Here’s a bit about Martha:
Martha Yasuda is a violinist, Suzuki teacher and has been arranging music for over 15 years. She has arranged an impressive number of books for string instruments including 19 books with duets for all pieces from Suzuki Books 1 through 10, recently licensed by the International Suzuki Association. You can check out her website here: Yasudamusic.com
I find her materials a great resource to have in my studio and think parent and teachers alike will find them useful.