If you're like me you have a big to do list. Being a Suzuki Parent can feel like it's own big to do list. . . Attend Lessons Take notes Ask the right questions Attend Group Classes & recitals Make sure your child has all the materials & equipment they need Make sure to listen every day Practice on the days that you eat! The list could go on and on and I'm sure you understand how important it is. …
Do one of of these descriptions sound like you? You signed your child up for music lessons because they have begging you for years to play an instrument. Or, you play(ed) and instrument and couldn't wait to get your own child started too. Maybe, you always wished you could have taken lessons as a child and are excited to provide the opportunity to your children. then reality sets in . . . After the honeymoon phase is over, you realize…
The following is an excerpt from the book Beyond the Music Lesson: Habits of Successful Suzuki Families which officially comes out on Amazon Thursday June 22nd. It is meant to be a resource for families looking to answer the question: "How do we make the Suzuki method work in our every day life?" I was a Suzuki student, starting lessons at the age of two and a half. There are parts of being successful at the Suzuki method that…
I was trying to come up with the most useful thing I could share with other teachers on the topic of working with parents. So, I started to think about all of the things I do in my studio like conferences, parent education, and parent talks.
There are lots of things we can do as teachers to help parents be successful. However, I would like to ask teachers to think bigger picture than that.
As a young violin teacher I heard a concept that blew my mind at the time. When you look at the beginner student in front of you – don’t think about what they need in order to learn to play twinkle. Think about what they need in order to play a Mozart Concerto and teach them with that in mind.
I believe we need to do the same thing with new Suzuki Parents.
When I think about the families that I work with the most productively I think about families that:
Mine was, hands down, Itzhak Perlman. The first time I saw him perform live was 1999, but I remember watching him at home often as a child. I watched him on Sesame Street (You can see one example here), in documentaries, and in recorded concerts on VHS tape.
I was totally entranced by his playing. It was my dream to be able to do what he was doing.
When I was six years old I came home upset from group class one day. Another student had teased me my facial expressions while playing.
I vividly remember my dad sitting me down in front of a video of Perlman playing. He told me “if he can make faces while playing, so can you!” I have never felt bad about my overly expressive face again. Add my dad to my list of musical heroes!
Perlman was my model of a great violinist as a child. His playing was like a carrot on a string, dangling out there as something to work towards.
Listening to Suzuki recordings helped me learn my pieces and build my technique but listening to a great performer like this was a whole other level of inspiration.
One helped me learn my music; the other helped me learn the purpose for studying it in the first place.
Last week on the blog I wrote about how parents (not the physical space) are their children’s practice environment. You can read the article by clicking HERE.
This week I am going to share the 3 minute process that can radically change how productive and positive your practice sessions with your child are. I consider these few valuable minutes to be the most important thing you can do that will set up your practice environment for success. This is a practice I developed with my own children and I go through it mentally before each student that I teach as well.
It is tempting to think this is an unnecessary step,that we don’t have time, or that we’ll just make it as we go and get the same results but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Being intentional about how we run practice sessions as a parent sets our children up for success. It is 3 minutes a day (or less) that will save you hours of wasted time and save you tons of frustration.
I hope you’ll try it for a couple of weeks and let me know how it’s going!
Suzuki Early Childhood Education (SECE) is a big passion of mine. I am always excited to talk to other teachers and new parents about why I love it so much. My background is in Early Childhood Education and I consider teaching young students my specialty. I have taught in other ECE music programs before and there are lots of great things about them. I don’t have anything negative to say about them and I think that having a young child…
I’ve finished most of the parent teacher conferences in my studio for the year (If you want to read more about my process you can read more HERE & HERE). The most common issue I heard (besides learning to practice well as students start to become more independent in practice – a theme that kept coming up for the middle school students) was that in a number of families the parents felt like it was a daily battle to get practice started.
Let’s be honest – it is not very motivating to keep taking your child to music lessons if you know it means daily squabbles with your kids over the practice. Many working parents have just a few quality time hours a day with their kids and spending part of that time fighting about something is not a fun idea.
This is why parent teacher conferences are so important – I don’t know what practice is like for families at home without these honest conversations and sometimes these situations can be turned around quite easily, as long as parents are willing to put in a little effort to change the tone for practice.
In each of the cases where this issue was brought up we decided that the number one priority for this student and family was not moving forward on the instrument – it was developing a positive attitude about practice.
If practice is always a student playing something, an adult telling them what needs to be fixed and then student playing again and looking to the adult to tell them if it is good enough something is lacking.
Progress might be made but the student is not learning how to practice, how to self-analyze, or how to think critically.
Especially as students get older it is much more effective to ask questions than give the answers.
“How did that sound to you?”
“What do you think we should try to do better/improve?”
“Did you remember _______ (insert the teacher’s assignment/focus point here) for the whole song/section?”
“Did you think about what you were playing the whole time?”
“How do you think we should practice that?”
Learning to enjoy the process is a critical part of helping our children and students stay motivated and inspired. Of any of the aspects of motivation we have discussed in this series, it has the most long-lasting effects on them as people and musicians. It is easy to get too focused on outcomes and results and kill the joy of learning in the process. Let’s find ways to help both students and ourselves (as teachers and parents) enjoy this process together!
If learning something new is a daunting and dreaded task then why would anyone want to keep doing it?
I often tell parents that games and rewards can be very useful for very young students until they start to see learning music (and enjoying that process) as the reward. How do we develop this in our children and students?
Below are 5 great ways to help students develop the ability to enjoy the process of learning music. I was inspired for this post by a great article on the website Parents.com (click here to read) . The points in the article really echo what I see in my teaching and I expanded on some of them to fit our experiences as Suzuki parents and teachers.