PDF How to Get Your Child to Practice ... Without Resorting to Violence

How To Get Your Child To Practice... Without Resorting To Violence!!

Contents:

Offer yourself a treat for managing a week of practise - you need rewards just like your child does! You are both on a learning curve, and although you are the adult and they are the child, you are allowed to make mistakes and learn slowly just like they will.

If your child is over five, get a stopwatch, and time how long it takes to do five minutes of practise. Well surely it will take five minutes to do five minutes of practise, no? Note the time when you start, and then use the stopwatch to time everything you consider to be part of practise. If your child starts telling you about their sore arm, their fun game at school, what they want for dinner, or what they want Santa to bring, listen to them but stop the stopwatch.

Often they are very different amounts of time! Challenge them to make the times more similar, and remind them when they are drifting off from their music work. Over the course of a few days your practise time and the time it takes to finish a practice should get much much closer. Stay positive, get excited and get them excited about whatever it is you are working on, and stay on one practice point at a time. Give them stickers as rewards if they focus on the work, even if it is only for a few minutes.

Ask them to focus really well on something you want them to do, and then offer them the chance to decide what they want to do next. Make sure they are fed, watered and not too tired when you ask them to practise. Each time they do something well, give them a toy. If they are doing well but you have lots left, give them more than one each time. Use a small toy, placed to start on yellow, and move it up through the colours if they do well. If they are naughty, move it down through orange towards red and tell them they can work their way back towards yellow again.

Warn them before moving them down, but just move them up every time you feel they deserve it. If you stay on red for more than five minutes, end the practise and tell them they can try again tomorrow. Depending on how bad the behaviour that left them on red was, you might want to consider the naughty step. Under fives cannot concentrate for very long, and they are not used to controlling their bodies in concentrated ways.

Get them to shake after each element of practising, and give them the opportunity to be silly and playful. Ten star-jumps is a great way to get a tired child re-energised and often hilarious to watch. Offer them a treat when they get to a certain number of gold stars. If your child is finding it really hard to concentrate, you might decide that this should be three gold stars before a treat is forthcoming. If they are finding it a little easier, it might be ten or twenty gold stars before the treat is theirs.

Make sure the treat is not one they will get anyway. Tell them you wish you had a magic wand that would make it all perfect, but sadly only hard work will do that for them. Be sure to praise them whenever they manage good concentration, even if only for a couple of minutes. This is the toughest part of all of it, but you are the adult and they are a child.

Of course there are some occasions when anger is necessary, appropriate and useful. Mostly this is to do with organisation - in the lesson and at home.

Take a notebook to your lesson and write notes as if someone else had to do the practice for you. Make sure you feel confident that you understand each point your teacher covers, and that you can re-explain it to your child at home - they may remember nothing about some parts of the lesson! Also use any gadgets that will help you at home - we are blessed with amazing mobile phones that have video, voice recorders, cameras, tuners, metronomes and virtually everything else you need to start a Symphony Orchestra let alone help a kid learn an instrument.

Take a photo of your child standing in exactly the right way, so you can compare it to what they do at home. This is assuming you are ahead and having fun or at least no tears at some point during the practice.

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So, try to work out what it is that causes the breakdown of happy practising. Try to guard against these as much as possible by practising at a good time for you and your child, and making sure they have eaten and drunk something. If you think your child is under the impression that they will never be able to conquer whatever it is they are working on, break it down further and further until they can manage it relatively easily.

For example, if you are working on five notes and your child is messing up three of them, get the first note right on its own to start off with.

Then add one more note, then one more note, etc. This may take some days but that is fine - you have many days to get this stuff right. Try to demonstrate how each step takes them closer to their goal, and acknowledge that it is not easy and you have no magic wand that can make it so.

Tell them you wish you could do that, but the only way is to treat it like baking bread - you have to follow each step, be patient, and eventually you have a loaf of bread to eat. But although we can go to the shop and buy bread for a pound, we cannot buy ability through any other means than effort. Any child who has seen a baby struggling to learn how to walk will probably find it helpful to be reminded of that process - it takes about a year but the baby just keeps going and going and going until each stage on the way to walking has been achieved.

It also takes about a year to be able to play your first piece on an instrument the way you want it to be, and although the teachers are acutely aware of how far along the process you and your child are, you and your kid may have no idea at all.

Tough love: do your children a favour

Try to remember that the only children who never learn how to play their instruments are the ones that give up trying. It is an immensely valuable lesson to learn at a young age that your struggle will eventually, inevitably, lead you to success if you approach it in the right way. Some practical checks you should do if your practice is ending in tears: In order to cover the practice set it may be necessary to do a little, have a break, then do a little more, rather than try and do it all in one go. If you feel you are being set too much to do at home, please please please talk to your teacher about it.

The Suzuki approach is big on discipline - but only for lack of effort. If your child is trying but failing it is your job to make it easier for them to try again, or change what you are asking them to do.

2. Instill in your child a sense of family and friends as teammates

If this is the case, explain the situation to your teacher, and concentrate on reviewing the things your child can already do, rather than trying new things. You watch the lesson, your child is attentive and understands what the teacher is doing with them, takes it on board, and everything seems hunky dory. Then you get home and try to do exactly the same thing and suddenly your child wants to do it a completely different way which they insist is what their teacher taught them. What should you do? Then see if you can get through the first thing on the practice list without disagreement.

Sometimes parents are wrong, and the teacher can help you before you come to blows about it. Then at home you can watch the video together and try to reproduce what you see on it.

If you are having a disagreement about what the perfect bowhold looks like, check out our gallery and compare and contrast yours with ours. If they say their tone is beautiful and you think it sounds like cat torture, record them on your phone or computer and play it back to them. If they prefer the CD see if you can work together to make their sound more like the CD. If they still disagree they are obviously just trying it on, and you need to go into disciplinary mode.

If you need help with this, check out the advice in my child is really naughty in practice time. If your child is completely refusing to agree with you about something and you believe they are being genuine rather than naughty, either do it their way and try again tomorrow, or move the practice on to something you both agree on. You can always try again tomorrow! Sometimes all they need is a little time to consider what you have said either consciously or not before they believe you and give it a go the correct way.

If you think the problem is that they find doing it correctly too difficult, head down to it all seems too difficult. Learning an instrument is hard. It makes learning to drive look like a walk in the park, and your child is still in primary school! Take a deep breath, forget the big picture and how daunting it is, and concentrate on step one.

One of the great things about the Suzuki approach is that every step has been broken down and down and down until literally anyone and everyone can do it. Practise to the priority. If your practice list consists of four things that all seem too hard today, pick one to start off with. Work out the very first, teeny tiny step. Say to your child practice is sometimes like building with lego - you have to start with one block.

Then work out the next step, add a block, and slowly work your way to success. It might help some children to actually build a lego house or whatever during the practice - they will be able to recognise the progress they are making in building a lego house much more easily than working out what they are doing in terms of musical progress.

Schools resolve conflicts by getting kids to talk things out

If your child is just starting, email us for a Pre-Twinkle Teaching Plan and have a happy practice doing stuff you both find easy. It was a bit of a dry read. Full of philosophy, but lacking in specific ideas to help motivate kids to practice. Jun 10, Dianna rated it really liked it.

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Some brilliant bedtime reading for parents of Suzuki kids by people who really know what they are talking well, writing about. If you think the problem is that they find doing it correctly too difficult, head down to it all seems too difficult. It took me a while getting here, and I suspect it may have been the case for my sisters as well, but we are all in rather peaceful places right now knock on wood. Try to remember that the only children who never learn how to play their instruments are the ones that give up trying. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Depending on how bad the behaviour that left them on red was, you might want to consider the naughty step.

This book had more discussion of philosophy behind practice than I expected I was hoping for practical tips —but it did have practical tips and suggestions too, and I'm glad I read it. Dec 21, Catherine rated it it was amazing. Great ideas for my daughter who recently started taking piano and for me, her crazy perfection driven mom who cringes at every missing sharp and flat! Amy rated it really liked it Apr 01, Megan rated it it was ok Oct 26, Erica rated it liked it Apr 23, Sharon Danzger rated it really liked it Feb 14, Blueai Paul rated it it was amazing Jun 03, Catherine M rated it liked it Oct 06, Anna rated it really liked it Aug 07, Yorelys Jordan santos rated it liked it Oct 18, Rachel rated it liked it Aug 03, Sarah rated it really liked it Oct 30, Cecile marked it as to-read Feb 09, Sharla added it Mar 18, Suzuki added it Nov 16, Katie Marsan marked it as to-read Jan 18, Kelly is currently reading it Jan 28, James added it Feb 21, Jayne Ekins marked it as to-read Jul 24, Polly Poon marked it as to-read Sep 23, Julia Plumb marked it as to-read Jan 01, Wendy is currently reading it Mar 14, Megan added it Jun 30, Jennifer is currently reading it Aug 12, Kerrimills marked it as to-read Jan 05, Momof5boys added it Jan 16, Sara Makinen marked it as to-read Sep 26, Stephanie Morrison is currently reading it Oct 13,