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Summer is always a bit of a paradox when it comes to instrument study. On the one hand, your child may have considerably more free time than during the year—what a great time to fit in extra practice! On the other hand, your child may be going for weeks without a private lesson due to inconsistent summer schedules of your family and your teacher—so now what do you DO

with all that extra practice time? As teachers, we have a lot of strategies to keep practicing fresh, fun and fulfilling, and I know that as parents, you also have a huge amount of collective knowledge about how to engage your kids. Below is a bullet point list of some ideas to try this summer as you practice with your kids. We’d also really love to hear from all of you in the comment section what you’ve tried, what works, what doesn’t, and what new ideas your family came up to make the most of summer practice.

• Practice in the park–just make sure to keep your instrument out of direct sunlight so your varnish doesn’t melt…
• Make practice charts that your child can check off each time they play a piece with a beautiful bow hold, or without any memory slips, or anything else that particularly challenges your child.
• Hide stuffed animals around the apartment along with notes that ask the child to practice something in particular–this way the instructions are coming from the stuffed animal, not you!
• Have a practice play date so you can trade practice partner duties with another parent. Children always behave better with a non-related adult…
• Organize an informal recital in your home to provide motivation to keep on those review pieces. Have your child play all of their review pieces in descending order (so they get to the easiest piece last).
• Use edible counters for repetitions–grapes, blueberries, m&ms…
• Create games of chance to see what you will practice: make a spinner, use dice, make a deck of cards, etc.
• Record your child–maybe even make a CD! Send the

  recording to friends and family, and your teacher!

One weekend afternoon, when I was admittedly much less rushed than usual in my practicing with Gabriel, I remembered a practicing game to help make repetition fun. He was frustrated with learning a challenging bow distribution in Go Tell Aunt Rhody and was resistant to playing it more than a few times. He needed a LOT more practice of this spot to get over the hurdle and beyond the frustration. I got out paper and drew a big circle. I invited him to draw part of a face after each time he played the tricky bowing correctly. He jumped right in, playing away, excited to add silly details to his face to show me. We each did a face, actually, and he loved seeing what I would draw as well. This game went so well that we continued playing, this time putting lego pieces together for each repetition. We did this both days of the weekend. A practice success!!

www.thepracticeshoppe.com

I have found a wonderful website with free practice charts that are simple to download and print. There are charts to mark for practicing each day in a month, or each day toward a specific goal .

My favorite charts are for keeping track of how many times you play something: it could be a difficult part of a new piece that the student needs focused work on, it could be how many review pieces played, how many Twinkles, how

many bow circles, etc. It seems to be a lot more fun to play things over and over when you can see your progress in colored stars or checked off boxes in a maze of 260 squares!

My son happily crossed off pictures of Popsicles for each repetition of O Come Little Children played with the right bowings, and did another sheet for plucking the piece. He learned the notes and bowings more quickly and accurately than I thought he would, because of all of his daily repetitions

along with hearing the piece ON REPEAT each day while eating, playing, and even sleeping. I was dreading our work on this piece, as it is notoriously difficult to master the bowings without a lot of frustration, but our new practice charts really helped both of us!

Visit www.thepracticeshoppe.com, go to FREE DOWNLOADS, click on the TITLE of a chart your child likes, and start printing. Make your practicing fly by with purpose!!

Today a young student played with noticeably different ease at her lesson. Everything was working well–bow arm, left hand, cello position–and she was finally playing her Twinkles really, really well. She was looking tired and had a cold but even so was not at all distracted or antsy for the entire lesson.

I know that she and her mom had recently discovered using You Tube to listen and watch other kids playing cello pieces, which had helped to motivate and inspire this student, who was not always full of energy in her lesson or willing to practice easily at home. But something else must have changed. I asked her mom if she had been listening or watching other children on You Tube more often this week, as she looked like she was playing at a whole new level of ease and enjoyment.

Her mom said. “Well, we have been listening a lot more to the CD this week.” That was it–it was so clear. She really KNEW the pieces inside out now and could focus on her bow hold, cello hand and position, as the music was continually playing in her head. She had real phrasing in her playing and had kept up beautifully with the cello group for the first time a few days earlier. We had also easily learned a new section of the next piece, which had been too difficult for her to remember during our last few lessons.

Listening is so often overlooked in our busy schedules when in fact it is the easiest and least stressful part of the process….and something parents should really take charge of. As I write this I have three pieces playing on a loop from the website www.grooveshark.com, which has the Suzuki violin and cello books 1-3. You can easily select what you want to listen to and put it on repeat from any computer with sound. Right now we are listening to Go Tell Aunt Rhody, O Come Little Children, and

May Song (Gabriel’s current piece and next two pieces) on a repeat loop during dinner, right after our cello practice, and for falling asleep.

One word of warning: I NEVER call attention to the fact that we are going to listen or that I am putting music on…..if I do I ALWAYS get an argument, and if

I don’t say a word we all happily listen for 1-3 hours

each day.

I hope all of you Suzuki parents can give yourself and your child the gift of repeated listening!! You can even make a playlist of review pieces for a certain concert, or put on your child’s current piece

and upcoming piece or two…. it is too easy NOT to try it….and we all deserve the results: less resistance and more progress (and fun!) with our kids!!

It’s been exciting to see everyone taking part in the 50 Days of Practice and we’re already hearing wonderful results! As the parent, clearly the largest part of the

commitment to daily practice falls on you, and so to help you stay inspired through these next weeks, we will be posting a short weekly entry with words of wisdom –and commiseration—on practicing.

Hands down the best book on practicing with

your child is “Helping Parents Practice: Ideas for Making it Easier” by Edmund Sprunger. I will be shamelessly lifting most of my ideas

from his book but I can’t encourage you enough to buy the whole book so you can have it in its entirety.

Sprunger’s title refers to making practice an easier process for both children and parents, but it is also an oblique reference to the very core of practicing itself—why do we practice? To make things easier. It’s such a simple concept, but to be honest, I didn’t latch on to that until I was in my early 20s as a conservatory student. Practicing is not just to get “better” or “fix” what’s wrong, it’s to make playing easier, and hence more enjoyable.

As Sprunger says:

“When the goal of practice is to “fix things,” then a child’s performance tends to be limited to a hope that all the things you fixed stay fixed—not a set-up likely to give a child’s musical soul the freedom it needs to emerge. Practicing to “correct” things tends to have the effect of making children feel like they themselves are in need of correction for their very being, and they are more likely to be resistant during practice.

You don’t practice something only because the teacher said so. You practice it because some aspect of it is not easy and automatic yet.

One of the biggest struggles is dealing with the frustration that children usually have when they bump into the reality that things are seldom immediately easy, and that merely wishing to make them easier just doesn’t work. It takes practice. Children are not the only ones who face this frustration: parents and teachers do too! For the child, much of the toil comes in the form

of repeating things. For the adults, the struggle is often with figuring out ways to help the child work through the disappointment that accompanies the discovery that the world isn’t magic…The adult who practices with the child needs daily practice, so that over time, he or she gradually learns how to accomplish these enormous tasks.”

50 Days of Practice isn’t just going to make things easier for your child, it will gradually make practicing with your child easier as you consistently, habitually, take part in the process of teaching and learning with your child.