Back to School Practice Problems

Lessons have just started for the school year here in Oregon.

As a parent this can be a hard time of year for practicing with our kids.

Here are some things you might be experiencing at home right now:

Your child is getting used to long structured school days again and it feels unfair to make them practice at the end of the day.

Your child is tired after school and doesn’t have much energy left for practice.

Your teen is trying to figure out how to organize time for homework and practice is falling through the cracks.

You are exhausted by the frenzy of back to school activities and to be honest practicing with your kids is less than appealing right now.

Here’s the good news . . .

Working Productively with Your Child in Practice

In the Suzuki method we work with our children very closely in practice. The younger a child is, the more parents are involved in the process.

As a teacher I depend on the parents in my studio to help their children practice and complete listening assignments at home. Without their help very young students would not remember all the details I am asking them to practice all week long.

Practicing with our children isn’t always easy though. You can read more about my struggles with my own children in this article: Confessions of A Suzuki Parent.

As a young mom and new teacher I had a pretty idealistic and unrealistic idea of how to practice well and it certainly got in the way of helping my own children learn their instrument to the best of their ability. At least until I started to learn more about how to do it well.

Ever since I have been trying to learn and share as much as I can to help parents and students work together successfully.

As parents we all have our own reasons for signing our children up for music lessons. It also becomes clear very quickly that one size does not fit all when it comes to practice tips and ideas.

It’s important to make sure we’re practicing in a way that works with the unique child in front of us.

How do we work together with all of this in mind?

Scheduling Your Child’s Fall Lessons

As a parent I know all too well what it feels like to get children’s schedules lined up for the school year.

Your child may be involved in many different activities and it may feel like a puzzle to get them all to fit together.

Alternately, your family may limit activities to a couple each season but getting signed up for the right ones before they are full and making the schedule work for your family may be a challenge.

What about music lessons?

This article was originally given as a short presentation at the Suzuki Association of the America’s Leadership retreat last week. It was parent of a series of short talks about working productively with parents. If you would like to share it please do!

How do we work productively with the parents in our studios? How do we help new parents understand what being a Suzuki parent involves? How do we help them be successful working with their child as they learn and grow?

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.

Working Productively with parents

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.

What do the parents we work with need to know about the process of helping their child thrive in the Suzuki method?
What can we explain better from the start that will keep parents from struggling later?
What bad habits can families get into that might not matter for a beginning student but will cause big problems down the road?
How do we take parents – who probably don’t know what they are getting into when they get started with us and help them make the Suzuki method work in their everyday lives?
How do we help get them come on board and be willing work with us to help their child succeed?

When I think about the families that I work with the most productively I think about families that:

Why Summer Lessons are So Important

Much research has been done on the effect of summer breaks and academic performance.

Research shows that when students are not filling their summers with educational and enriching activities (Here is an interesting study) they may lose months of progress compared to their peers who keep learning in an enriching environment (like education camps, reading books from the library, and other activities like this).

Some articles I’ve read suggest it taking at least four to six weeks to catch up again each fall, other suggested up to 2.8 months.

The same thing can happen if students “take a break” from lessons over the summer. We had a great discussion about this in the Suzuki Triangle Community. Teachers agreed that it takes 1-3 months, on average, to get a student back to where they were at the end of the school year if they don’t take summer lessons.

The first ten years or so that I taught I didn’t require summer lessons and I started to notice some trends beyond the amount of time it takes to playing skills back to their former level:

Frustration:

When something used to be easy is now a struggle (especially a struggle that students already had to go through once before) students feel frustrated.

I started to hear things like “I can’t” and “It’s too hard.” from students who certainly could just a few months before.

This really affects a students motivation to keep playing. I started to see a pattern of students not returning in the fall (because the idea of restarting after a long break was daunting). Sometimes those who did return had such a frustrating time that they didn’t stick with their instrument for long.

Motivation:

Playing an instrument is hard work. It’s motivating when we see progress and see our ability begin to grow and develop.

It is NOT Motivating if we lose those skills and have to relearn them.

While I don’t require students to take lessons each week in the summer I do require a level of attendance that I feel will help students maintain their playing skills over the summer months. I want them to be ready to spring ahead into new things when we get back into a fall routine.

Summer can Actually be a great time to make progress:

I’m excited to announce my new eBook What You Practice Today is Not Important: but who you become along the way is!

A lot of work went into it’s creation and I am happy to finally share it with you! You can read a short excerpt from this new resource below and get your own free copy by joining the Suzuki Triangle Community (you unsubscribe at any time).

Click HERE to sign up and get your copy through email!

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An excerpt from What You Practice Today is Not Important: but who you become along the way is!

Practicing can feel like it’s all about the little details.

It can feel like it’s about perfection and doing everything right.

Sometimes practice feels like a list you can never accomplish.

It feels like there’s not enough time to do all of our assignments from our teacher each week. It can be a challenge to get everything done.

But it’s not really about all that–it’s not about what your child does today that is most important. It’s not about doing all the tasks perfectly, all of the time.

Practice INVOLVES a lot of little details and trying to get things right for your next lesson.

But practice is not ABOUT all of that.

[This post contains affiliate links. This means that if you click on the link and purchase something it doesn’t cost you any extra but it does help support the cost of running the blog. I only link to items I actually recommend. Thanks for your support!]

One of my biggest tips for helping with home practice for young music students is to build a practice toolkit. Keep reading to find out why and some find great suggestions to include in your own practice toolkit.

What is a practice toolkit?

Sometimes having a productive practice session comes easily. Other days you may need some additional tools and ideas to help build focus & motivation into music practice.

The younger the student is, the more helpful it is to build a practice toolkit and have it on hand in your practice space.

However, even middle school students enjoy rolling dice for repetitions and using rhythm sticks to count out a difficult rhythm from time to time!

I suggest finding a pencil pouch, small box, or a side table drawer in your practice space to store it.

Why do we need one?

During my first 4 lessons with new parents in the studio I primarily focus on supporting parents and caregivers. I want to help prepare each new family to be successful in the upcoming weeks and months.

Each week I assign families a few tasks to do at home that will help them establish good practice habits. These include: listening assignments, finding a practice time each day, and setting up the practice space.

Picture of small practice items. Suzuki Triangle blog

One assignment I give out on week three is to put together home practice toolkit.

This is a collection of items that will give you extra support during practice. Some days you won’t need your practice toolkit. However, other days having these practice aides on hand is a life-saver.

3 Minutes a Day to Radically Change Your Practice Sessions

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!

Steps

1. Find a small notebook (your regular practice notebook works) or open a document on your phone to use on an ongoing basis.

2. Use the template below to jot down a few notes about the upcoming practice. You may choose to do this right before the practice session or right after a practice session for the next day (review the notes before you start the next practice).

3. Use your answers to the questions below to structure your practices, set the tone and stay focused on what is really important.

Practice Pre-planning Template

“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” – Albert Einstein

I came across this quote the other day and was hit by how true this is of many Suzuki teachers I know and how they teach. We strive to really teach the children in front of us, not only to teach the instrument or song a child is learning.

The quote also got me thinking about the way parents practice with their children. Are the parents that I work with practicing with their children with this kind of attitude? Do they focusing on understanding how their child learns and then setting up practice to use that knowledge to help their student learn? Are we setting up a practice environment that helps them thrive?

In Suzuki ECE training we learn that we as adults are our children’s practice environment.

The tone we set . . .

The mood we bring . . .

The attitude we have . . .

Even beliefs we have about what & how children can learn.

All of these things work together to created the environment that your child is learning and practicing in all week long.

Attitude is Everything

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.

Practicing