9:00 am, 11:00 am, 1:00 pm, 3:00 pm, — Practice Time, What’s Big Deal? If you find yourself immersed in violin tuning, violin fingering charts and perhaps Suzuki music you may find following helpful.
This short article is first in a series aimed at shedding some light on this mystery of encouraging your child to enjoy, maybe even look forward to violin practice time.
If you can relate to any of following statements, please don’t tell rest of us!
1. My child is so motivated to practice her violin, she will go to bed early in order to awake and be ready for practice at 6:00 am.
2. My son quit soccer team because it was cutting into his violin practice time. 3. I often spend many hours online searching for free violin sheet music just to satisfy my daughter’s unquenchable thirst for new music. She loves challenge!
4. We cancelled our family trip to Hawaii because our son just couldn’t bear fact that he would miss two violin lessons. He’s just s-o-o-o motivated and we don’t want to break that spirit in him.
5. Violin tuning has become a fun family event, we all love to get involved.
6. My daughter is learning about fractions by memorizing different violin sizes, 1/16, 1/10, ¼, who know fractions could be so much fun?!
For rest (probably 99.99%) of us, let me assure you, there is hope! Chances are, we may never be able to claim any one of four statements above, but there are positive, fun methods of encouraging your child to practice without pain to them or you.
Time of day. Three little words that pack a huge punch when it comes to creating an effective practice time. Two things you need to consider are: 1. Your child’s age 2. Observe what time of day they have highest level of concentration.
My daughter began studying violin at age five. At that time we practiced in morning, for no particular reason other than it was a convenient time. Occasionally, practice time would get pushed back to afternoon hours, no big deal …. or so I thought. Those afternoon practices never went well, but sometimes I don’t catch on too quickly. In fact, somewhat unfavorable afternoon practices were not what clued me in to fact that my child was not an “afternoon person.” It was her writing practice that finally got through to me. Five minutes worth of writing practice in morning became 20 to 30 minutes of agony in afternoon. Aha! The light bulb had been turned on, “Maybe,” I said to myself, “just maybe she is a morning person!”