Maxims for Monday (and Tuesday)

Smile.

Become Childlike.

Celebrate.

Talk with enthusiasm and laugh.

Make jokes out of difficult situations.

Intently focus on the Tone of what your child is playing.

Gracious Honesty in all commenting on her practicing spots.

Learn to really listen to your child’s Heart through their Music.

Speak about what you hear in her Playing, how it opens up your imagination.

Become joyful and exuberant in little things.


Praise with abandon, but truthfully.

Do not build a people pleaser during practice,
we want the child to appreciate fine music and nurture their creative expression, not educate children for our own vanity.

Do not praise falsely, children hate hypocrisy.

Do not talk down to any child, they are close to God and deserve to be approached as such.

Do not frown.

Do not come to a practice session with emotional baggage or worry or stress.

Clear yourself first
then practice with your child.

The Secret

The secret to getting children to practice is to realize that you can not make them want to do anything that they do not want to do. Not through bribes, threats, being nice or being angry. Children can not (and really should not) be manipulated.

We must look to the environment

and look at how we can shape their surroundings to nurture their innate ability to want to learn.

Their most important environmental influence is, You!

As the home coach and daily practice helper, your attitude, the way the you approach practice will shape how they approach practice.

Love of fine music and curiosity

If from a genuine sense of curiosity and love of fine music you approach each day’s practice with a smile, a patient and pleasant way of speaking and truly want to learn something about life yourself your child will sense this and learn to do the same.

This will not take place instantly, but over time this can become the way that both parent and child approach musical practice. Through practicing the practice.

Music Technology

A few Web sites for Music Students and Parents


Ricci Adam’s MusicTheory.net

This is a free source of drills and exercises in all of the basics in music theory.
The Ear training is a great addition to this as well.

www.musictheory.net

Printing Staff Paper

To print out your own blank sheet music with various options for staff and layout this is a great site for budding composers who want to score their own music on hard copy!

www.blanksheetmusic.net


Maestro Max’s online resource for parents and students

From Music history and Biography’s to the musician yellow pages this site has a lot of links to things musical!

www.harmonicvision.com


BMP

A fun way to determine the tempo of a piece is to tap out the beats using a digital BPM analyzer! This is really easy to use and will help parents and students set tempos for their practice and performance!

www.all8.com



Suzuki Piano Basics Site

The writings of Dr. Kataoka from newsletters
and lots of Suzuki Resources

http://www.core.ecu.edu/hist/wilburnk/SuzukiPianoBasics/


Online site for finding supplies for Suzuki Piano students
also resources for violin students.

www.Discographyonline.com

Developing Memory

Pitch Memory through Ear Training

Playing “find the note” increasing from single notes in a one octave C major scale then begin to increase the complexity by adding the black notes to form a one octave chromatic scale. Intervals can then be introduced in one octave and then triads on white keys. Progress into all of the intervals can made by adding the black notes as well in one octave.


The final step
is to expand the C major scale out to two and then three and so on to the whole keyboard and then add in the other steps (ie. Chromatic scale notes, intervals on C major then all intervals, triads on C major scale then all triads.)

How to tips:

With interval practice and triads, students name the notes from the bottom up, training their ears to hear the more difficult lower tones! Young children and older students are all challenged and enjoy this game, especially if they get to test the teacher or parent on the same test after they accomplish several correct answers!

It's ok for young children to learn in an easy way

I have found that with very young children it is fine for them to see where the teacher or parent is playing on the keyboard and then for them to play back what they hear and see. Older students are not allowed to see, but must learn to hear the pitch.


Make a Story

Each piece that the student learns has a structure, book one is mostly ABA format, (ie. Theme A then Theme B then Theme A again) a simple and fun way to build memory associations with these forms is to create characters or labels that can be made into stories for the pieces.


Let's Go to Africa. All children love animals!

For instance: A = Tall Giraffe, B = Hungry Lion, and the piece is a story about how the tall Giraffe is looking out for the Hungry Lion! This is a fun way to engage the imagination and build the ability to memorize musical abstract structures by attaching concrete and fun images to the different sections.



Listen. Listen. Listen

Listening is perhaps the greatest single thing that you as a parent can do to increase your child’s memory, if they have quality music, especially the music that they are going to be working on in the future then they will be building a clear sound image for what they will be playing and learning in the future.

Help Your child develop fine musical memories!

This ability to learn by ear, once it is learned and put into practice will enable them to learn pieces quickly and listen to the examples and modeling done in the lessons with greater clarity and precision. So please play the recordings for your children! Help them to develop fine musical memories!

With Love, Joy, Peace and Hope,
Ben

P.S. Tomorrow we will be looking at Musical Technology to use in practice!

MLK

Due to the MLK Holiday we will be resuming discussion Tuesday.


Let us take a few minutes to remember what MKL Stood for, the progress that has been made, and the areas of improvement that we must speak out, and take action for.

With Joy, Love, Peace and Hope,
Ben

Blossoming Character

Note: Yesterday the WiFi was down and so this is the post for Thursday and today!
Our next topic will be more technical on Monday, how to develop memory skills!


Teaching Music is about Relationships

Over the past years of teaching I have had the privilege of working with several students on a long term basis. The relationships that develop from this are rewarding for me for several reasons: one, it is simply amazing to be an active part of a child’s artistic development from an early age up to their adult life. From the first lessons in how to bow correctly, through the stages of beginning steps and the many recitals that come each year, the child grows into a fine musician and along the way develops life skills that we could call character traits.

Character Through Persistence

Persistence is one of the most common traits that all children develop while studying the piano over the course of 10 years or more. This one trait however is perhaps the single most important one for a child to develop to succeed at college and then outside in the world of community, business, education and government. How many stories have we heard of great people who have taught the world something about life, who had to have persistence?!!

The Life Cycle of Music Lessons!

I recently began to coach a student who has come back after a few years of college and then marriage. She has a child now and that child is coming with her mother to piano lessons as an infant. It is fascinating to me to observe this little baby respond to the music, smile at the studio children who come in for their lessons and begin to learn through the studio environment about music, art and relationships. She can not speak yet, but I’m anxious to hear what she will have to say in a year or so…

What is your child developing?

Perhaps you can think of other character traits and relationship building skills that your child is learning through music lessons, the studio environment, the parent, teacher and child interdependent relationship and home practice.

The Blossoming of a child’s character through:


Persistence, Patience, Love of Learning, Courage, Self Presentation, Nurturing Relationships with Adults, Artistic development, Empathy, Learning how to contribute to a Community of learners, Honesty in practice and lessons, Accountability, Respect for self and others, Listening to others and instruction, Creative Expression, and the list could continue for a very long time!


With Joy, Love, Peace and Hope,
Ben

Update

Dear Readers,

I will be taking today off to spend time in reflection and vision casting.

Enjoy your day,

With Joy, Love, Peace and Hope,

Ben

P.S. See you Tomorrow for a discussion on Blossoming Character!

Creative Imagination

Children love to be creative and have wonderful imaginations.
It seems that as children grow older these attributes become less emphasized in their education. Perhaps this is why there are so many adults who are so unhappy in their careers and lives.

What happens to childlike imagination?
Perhaps as children they were not nurtured in their creativity and their imaginations were not encouraged by teachers and parents and other well meaning adults.

Great People of imagination
Great people like Suzuki, Einstein, Edison, Gandhi, Beethoven, Picasso, all had highly developed imaginations.

Einstein
I remember reading about Einstein in my early twenties and being amazed at how he used pure imagination to develop many of the intricate theories and concepts that have shaped so dramatically how we now view the world.


Let us find ways to encourage children to be imaginative, then to be creative.

It seems that one and the other come together in children so naturally, and in adults we see a seperation of the two at times. A child can be imaginative and create an experience or object out of their imagination. Often adults will do one or the other. Let’s look hard at our own lives and see where we are imaginative and can begin to create something.

How to nurture your Imagination and Creativity

Maybe it’s simply imagining a fun vacation that we had in the past year and then posting pictures up on the fridge, or perhaps simply finding joy in arranging a vase of flowers on the table. These simple acts are everyday art!
With Joy, Love, Hope and Peace,
Ben

Tomorrow we will be talking about Blossoming Character

Revealing the Invisible

Most of a Student’s work is invisible. She (or he) will spend 30 minutes at a weekly lesson in front of a teacher with her parent helper and perform her lesson pieces and receive instruction on how to practice for the next session. Here the student is rewarded with praise and affirmation with a supportive parent observing and approving of her work in the class and a believing teacher who is offering encouragement and making honest comments about the work that has been done.

Never underestimate
Then the student goes home and practices for six days with her Home Helper. And the cycle is repeated throughout the year. At recitals a student is offered another chance to showcase her work through her performance and this is highly motivating! Never underestimate the power of recitals to motivate practice!

How do we help the younger student see their work on a daily basis? See it with a sense of accomplishment, and find motivation in the day to day practice between events?

Some Ideas:


Start a Practice Calendar

for every day that a students practices, she rubber stamps or places a sticker on the day! This is one of the oldest forms of making the invisible visible! After a month has gone by look over all of the markers for her work and praise her!

A system of accomplishment can be set up as well that will reward with achievement medals different levels of practice, for instance after 30 days of continuous practice there is a 30 day recognition award given to the student at the recital. This is great because is rewards with recognition, persistence and consistency, not simply memorization or facility.


Coloring Sheets

Other ways to mark the practice is to create sheets of 50 and 100 marks, that represent repetitions on practices and then hanging these in the studio or the home practice space. The pages can be a fill in the dots to make pictures, or simply color in different pictures with 50 - 100 spots to fill in!

Quilting

One parent had the fantastic idea of creating a practice quilt that marks certain accomplishments in a lasting way.

And these are simply a few of the ways that we can begin to find ways of Making the Invisible work of daily practice Visible!

See you Tomorrow when we will be discussing the Creative Imagination

With Peace, Love, Hope and Joy,
Ben

Me and You Time

Motivational Book
I’ve been reading the very first motivational/self-improvement book published in the U.S. and it’s rather dubious title is: Think and Grow Rich written by Napoleon Hill. The book has been a staple for many American entrepreneurs since the 1930’s. As a book that teaches the organization of accomplishment there are many fantastic principles that can be applied to artistic work with your child.

Power of the Master Mind
The one that I wanted to talk about today is what Hill calls the Power of the Master Mind. Which in common 21st day language would be called a “Think Tank” or “Brain Storm Group” “Vision Cast” or something similar.

A Spirit of Harmony for a definite purpose
Gandhi was perhaps one of the last century’s greatest examples of someone who used this concept in a positive way and according to Hill, his method was in “inducing 200 million people to coordinate, with mind and body, in a spirit of harmony for a definite purpose.”

Our greatest Challenge
Looking at this from an educators point of view I see that here is our greatest challenge as teachers and parents working with musical children. How can we creatively adopt this method of Gandhi in our everyday actions with children?


Become beautiful and lovable people as adults
One of the ways that I have seen this method begin to work is to become beautiful and lovable people as adults. Then really begin to apply the idea to “be the change that you want to see in the world. “ Once this is apparent in our actions, words and intention children begin to want to be around us, and it is far easier to ask them to practice a certain technique or learn a difficult concept.


Bruce Anderson's Re-phrasing Suzuki's philosophy
Children love to learn, you can not stop them from learning!
It just depends what they will learn. And they will learn whatever is put into their environment. (this is a paraphrase of a teacher with a great heart, Mr. Bruce Anderson.)

Children will want to spend time with us
So let us work to develop our own love of music, our own creativity, our own love of learning and by being beautiful and loving people, children will want to spend time with us, and will want to learn from us. I believe that they will learn from us whatever we model for them, at first accepting it as the way things are, and later realizing that they have a choice as well to become who they want to be.

Tips:

Practice being curious about your world with your child.

Help yourself find joy and fun in the day and talk about or show it to your child.

Treat yourself to something indulgent and out of that indulgence approach the “work” of practice with your child as a joyful and potentially playful activity!

Share your deep thoughts or those of others with your child and elevate the practice time into one of self improvement beyond a physical skill to a holistic practice.

Children grow up
Enjoy this time with your child, it will be over and finished very soon. (and perhaps this is some hope for parents who are overwhelmed… :-) children grow up and usually do not want to spend their teenage and older years working alongside of a parent figure as they develop their individuality.

With Love, Joy and Hope,

Ben

P.S. Tune in tomorrow for a talk about Revealing the Invisible - a concept that most parents are aware of, and that I was taught by a parent in Tacoma

The Mystery of Artistic Motivation

(Note: Snag Island Studio was closed yesterday due to Flooding, Make up lessons TBA)

Separation
While there is a mystique surrounding the artist and how he or she becomes inspired to create, we as educators and schools and parents often believe that we understand how to teach the mechanical side of the arts. And so there can be a separation between the Motivation, and Inspiration and the Technique and Mechanical aspects of art.


The need for motivation
After several years of working with parents of music students I’ve come to realize that as important as the technique is, and I do believe that proper technique is essential for a musician to develop. The more pressing need is to find ways to motivate the musical child. Dr. Suzuki teaches that it is through the environment that a child will learn, and so it is through the environment that we must work to motivate the child.

We can not expect a child to be self motivated to practice. So how do we help to create a motivating environment?

Tips


Attend Classical Piano Concerts.
This is perhaps one of the most powerful ways to motivate your child long term. The strength of having a real performer right in front of the child casting a musical spell over the audience is magic for the child's motivation! They now have a clear picture and sound in their heads of what they can do if they continue to practice. I was inspired to begin piano lessons after attending a high level student recital!

Sign up for a summer piano camp.
This is a huge motivator for students as they are with other young musicians, practicing on the same pieces, going to the same classes, learning from exciting new teachers, in an environment that is designed 24-7 to educate and motivate them! Summer camps become a ritual for the families that start them.

Plan to go to the State Suzuki Festival in September.
This is a state wide festival that is set up like a day camp, the only difference is that the teachers are mostly local to the state, and there is a Graduation concert for students who have passed a level in the Repertoire. This is only a one day event.

Come to every Recital and Home Rehearsal.
Bring family and supportive friends and teachers to the recitals. Make a big deal out of their accomplishments and enjoy the fun afterwards!

Participate in a multi-piano concert.
Students form a piano team and work with their team to prepare and perform their repertoire! These concerts can build great friendships and give the piano students a chance to work with their peers in a non-competitive environment! These take place every two years in Sacramento, every Three years in Seattle and every 18 months in Matsumoto Japan!

Wow, out of time this morning already! See you tomorrow

With love, joy and hope,
Ben

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at You and Me Time

Bubbles of Awareness

How do you work with such young children?
It has been a fun observation of mine that the younger a child is the smaller their bubble of awareness is! “How do you work with such young children?” many people ask me when I tell them that I work with as young as two year olds in classical piano. The simple answer that I’ve been giving to my friends and interested parents is that I simply play Intentional Musical Games with the children and through these they begin to learn the basics of playing the piano.

Creative imagination
What I’ve discovered through my research into playing games with students is that the younger a child is the smaller their physical sensory world is and at the same time the larger their creative imagination world is! So, I’ve taken to engaging with very young children through metaphor, story telling and also tangible sensory games, that involve moving their arms and fingers often large movements to introduce a technique.

Move in closer
Younger children have amazing hearing capabilities and I have found that to communicate with them most effectively I need to move closer to them and speak in a low tone of voice, too much volume and they shy away, too far away physically and they begin to forget that I’m in the room, and start to play in their imaginations!

How wonderful
How wonderful early childhood is! I want as an adult to be able to enter the creative imagination more often and engage the world through my senses as a 3 year old does!!! But, children already have this capacity for creativity, it is up to us to not suppress it, or try to train it out of them through scolding or expecting adult behavior from them.

Engage your child
So, engage your child in practice through games and a spirit of imagination and then you will be speaking and acting in their world! Sit close to them while practicing and if you must correct a technique or form do it with them, helping them to physically do the action.

Explanation
One more thing, I’ve been asking my students if they want to know the reasons behind certain techniques or practices and even the older students, 8 out of 10 would rather not talk about the intellectual reasons for a physical motion, of course some children will be interested, but I’ve found that the majority of students trust their parents and their teachers and simply want to play the music without a lot of explanation.

Correct method
This is natural and of course is the correct method to use with children, help them to do something, help them to engage their imaginations with art, and do not worry about the intellectual understanding that we as adults seem to be so caught up in…


With Joy, Peace and Hope,
Ben

p.s. Tomorrow we will be exploring The Mystery of Artistic Motivation

Pizza Parties

Childhood memories
As a child I attended an old Presbyterian Church in Tacoma. I can remember that it was next to a K-Mart (now Big K) and that a lot of my friends growing up where there. We would play games after the Sunday school classes and sing songs in the services that were often comforting to me. The evening services and hymns have stayed with me even now after 20 years. There was something that spoke of peace and rest and a certain type of "peace that passes understanding" that I still long for today.

Sunday-school teacher
Like all of the other church kids I attended Sunday school and one of my teachers was Craig, a football player at UPS and an engineer student he was most memorable to me for sporting a long and curly mullet, driving a large pick-up truck, having a cute girlfriend, and engaging with us kids in a way that motivated us.

The Challenge
As a class Craig challenged us to memorize the ten commandments, (I think I can still remember them…) and the carrot that he held out for us was a pizza party at his parents house way out on the peninsula with huge trees to climb, woods to play in games and lots of root beer! We all worked hard to memorize the Decalogue and after a few failed attempts as a group we finally had everyone on the list for the Pizza Party and the rest is history!

Impressed us
We talked about the pizza party before it happened for months and even now it is indelibly marked in my memories as one of my favorites!


Realization
This is a realization that I have had recently: children love Pizza Parties! (or any other type of festive celebration!) After every recital we always have a celebratory party with food and fun, this is a reoccurring marker of celebrating the students efforts.

Some tips for creating celebratory occasions

On a daily basis celebrate the progress verbally with honest and thoughtful praise. Remind your child of their next recital or other performance goal. Link this to the party afterwards and talk about how fun the recitals are!


Festive Markers
As a parent you can set festive markers for your child that help them to stay motivated to progress. Ideas include: planning a Pizza Party with friends after they finish a book, or other major accomplishment.

Caution
If you set a party as a “dream” for your musical child to reach for, you must follow through as planned when they reach their goal for it to be a memorable and positive experience. We don’t want children learning to associate disappointment with musical effort.

Ice cream = fun
My parents would treat our family to ice cream when a musical milestone was reached, that was fun too!

Have fun using your creativity to celebrate your child’s musical progress!

Tomorrow I will be talking about Bubbles of Awareness with children...

With Joy,
Ben

Scheduling Peace

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply tell students the what and the why of musical practice and then trust that they would take care of the rest?

Children do not have this capacity
But as I have observed, most children do not have this capacity for self motivation, self control and self direction in achieving musical goals! In fact if you have a child that has all of these characteristics consistently then “take them to the doctor!” they are not normal healthy children is what Dr. Kataoka used to say to parents.

So how do we help children to develop self motivation and other self directed attributes?
I have been researching this for the past eight years and it is through observing successful parent/child teams and also searching through Suzuki’s philosophy that led me to a few observations that I would like to share:

Scheduling Daily Practice at a consistent time and following through in a peaceful manner is perhaps the greatest key to helping children learn a musical instrument.

Some tips:


The Practice Alarm
some parents use a daily alarm to create a “third party” that controls the start time - that way the child and parent do not have a daily battle of wills to determine when the practice will happen.


Morning Practice is best
I recommend that the practice be in the morning before other tasks and school are begun, that way both child and parent are rested and can focus on the daily assignment before the stresses of the day tire and distract them.

Timing lessons and being fair
Timing lessons and being consistent and fair with the timer will allow that child to build a sense of ownership for the time spent and awareness of the difference between practice time and play time.

Once the issue of a start time is established and a daily alarm (either internal or external) is set and the practice is approached from a peaceful and focused manner by the Parent then children can begin to learn how to improve their music talents. This is a first step for young creatives to learn how to become self motivated as well!

Tomorrow we will be talking about Pizza Party Markers - or How to Develop Long Term Motivation in your Child! See you then, Ben