A Suzuki Parents Forum - and maybe a blog revival

Advice for New Suzuki Parents:

I've been a Suzuki violin mom/manager for over six years now, two years longer than I spent in college learning to be a geologist, one year longer than I had to work before I could become a Professional Geologist.  So…I should be an expert by now.  Gus is now 11 and completed Suzuki book 4 before he left the repertoire to study specific pieces and focus more on jazz and old time.  Huck is 8 and has almost completed book 3.  At times it seems like Twinkles were forever ago, at times it seems like just yesterday.

I am pleased that Sally asked me to participate in a parent panel for Suzuki parents.  There is much more to Suzuki music than just the lessons.  The lessons are important, of course, but its only one part of the puzzle.  And believe me, its a puzzle, one with moving and ever changing pieces.  Sometimes the pieces all fit, but usually they don't.  Sometimes lessons are going great, and home practice is a nightmare.  Sometimes the opposite is true.  We've had times when practice was awesome and the lessons just didn't work.  I have advice for both scenarios.  Of course sometimes none of it works.  I have advice for that too.  The most important advice I have is to figure out what works for your family and your children and you.  I hope our experience helps you some.  Here are some of the things that work for us:

• Live music - Kids need to see real people playing real music.  Go to the symphony.  Go to a bluegrass festival.  Seek out bands with fiddles.  Local band to see:  Mountain Minstrelsy, The Alleycats, Pure Cane Sugar, Tussey Mountain Moonshiners, Poe Valley Troubadours, and many more.  We get a lot of great bands at the Elk Creek Cafe in Millheim.  Its not so far, come on out.  For Gus, this was the very best motivator.  He has always loved live music.  Talk to the musicians.  Buy their CDs.  Support local music!

• Canned music - Listen to lots of music.  
• Listen to the CD, but don't just listen to the CD. Listen to CDs 1 through 4.  Four finally includes some music written for violin.  We had a great teacher at Suzuki Institute who recommended listening to your working piece 7 times a day.  It really works!  Playlists are great for this.  
• Listen to a variety of music.  Listen to the music you bought from the local musician last weekend, listen to all different styles:  old time, Celtic, Klezmer, jazz…
• Use YouTube - we use YouTube a lot.  I find an inspiring video every day.  I have a wonderful list from a favorite fiddle teacher called "Violin is not 10 Books".  It features 10 amazing fiddle/violin players playing 10 completely different styles of music.  It'll be my blog post tomorrow!

• Music Festivals - This weekend is Folk Gathering at Greenwood Furnace, Huntington, PA.  Music festivals are a great opportunity to get to know other families playing music. They're fun!

• 100 day practice challenge - Do it!  Start today.  Practicing every blasted day is the very best thing you can do.  Here are some blog posts about how we did it.  We decided to take the challenge as a family.  We would all practice our instruments every day for 100 days.  

• We printed out charts. You can find some nice ones online or make your own.
• We assigned prizes for one week of practice (pizza party), 25 days of practice (family movie night), 50 days (party with cake), 75 days (bowling), 100 days (for this we each picked a prize and they included going to a movie, going for a long bike ride, going out to dinner).  The key is to celebrate the small accomplishments!
• We set a minimum of 3 songs to count as a practice.
• After a while, it became a habit.  It took about 250 days for Huck :)  It wasn't practicing that became the habit, so much as planning for practicing.
• We kept going after 100 days.  The kids made it to 1000.

• Play games - Face it, doing the same thing over and over again is boring.  Many of the songs aren't fun to play.  The kids don't like them.  I don't like them.  How do we make it interesting?  We play games.  I started by playing games that I found in my very favorite practice book, Helping Parents Practice by Edmund Sprunger (more about books later).  I found games on the internet.  There are some great ones at ThePracticeShoppe.com.  But the real fun came when we started making our own.   
• Huck's favorite game used to be fish.  Using a magnet to "catch" the next song you were to play by the paperclip on its paper nose.  It drove me crazy but we played it anyway.  
• Gus enjoyed making his own game boards, and adding Star Wars clip art.
• We use lots of dice.  Assign each practice task a number and roll two dice (or one of those cool dice in a dice), the first number is the task, the second is either the number of repetitions or a focus (bow hand, violin hand, tone, standing on one foot, with your eyes closed).
• Always include "non-violin" tasks and focuses.  Silly stuff to get them moving around.  Hugs, high fives, jumping jacks.
• Don't assume they've outgrown games.  When all the boys could think about was baseball this spring, we played baseball.  It was brilliant!  I printed out an infield.  They each made a team of their favorite Lego guys (Darth Vader pitching to Harry Potter was a hoot).  Each day was an inning.  You rolled the die to find out what kind of hit you got (or not), rolled a second die for your task, completed it, then flipped a coin to find out if you were out (assuming you didn't roll a home run).  We kept score and this went on for weeks.  The real fun was not knowing how long the practice would last.  3 outs you're done!
• Dominoes!  Set up dominoes for each practice task and then knock them down.  Blocks - same idea.  Monkeys in a barrel - hang one from the stand for each song.
• The possibilities are endless.

• Read Books and Blogs - These books were invaluable to me.
• Helping Parents Practice, Edmund Sprunger (this lived in my bathroom for years)
• The Suzuki Violinist, William Star (tells you what you should be learning for each new song)
• Time to Practice, Carrie Reuning-Hummel (all about learning styles)
• The Suzuki books, Ability Development from Age Zero and Nurtured by Love
• My favorite all time blog post about "Why Its Worth It".

• Start a family band - Learn an instrument yourself and play together!

• Different styles - Find a kind of music your child loves, or you love, and learn to play it.  Don't be locked in to 10 Suzuki Books.  You can learn from YouTube or find a teacher. The great thing about Suzuki students is that they learn by ear.  There are great apps that will slow down a song to make it easier to learn.

• Most importantly, remember that your child always needs you.  Even when they don't want to admit it.  When they're little, and its new, your role is more obvious.  As they get older, its more subtle.  You may help them figure out their goals, structure their practice, or just be there.  Yesterday, Gus asked me if I could sit with him while he practiced and read a book.  Its a long, sometimes lonely, always challenging path that you're embarking on with your child.  Do it together.

Good luck!

100 day (or 2 year) practice challenge update

What started out as a 100 day practice challenge has been going on for two years now.  The kids have practiced every day for 2 years.  To me, its an awe inspiring accomplishment.  To them, its just what they do.

 We've relaxed a bit.  You don't practice when your sick, that just encourages martyrdom.  If the violins don't fit in the car with the skis for a ski trip, they get left at home.  Reasonable exceptions like that.  

That said, the practice challenge died a long time ago.  It stopped being a challenge and became a way of life.  They just practice every day.  

Does that make it easy? Nope.  

Does it translate to other instruments, math or Spanish?  Nope. 

 Are all the practices cheerful and fun?  Hell no. 

What?  They aren't cheerful and fun?  Isn't it supposed to be easy by now?  

The standard Suzuki advice to any challenge is that you need to "build the relationship first."  Yup, build that relationship and it will all be easy-peasy.  As if building a relationship is like building a stone wall that once built will last forever and will over time be covered by pretty flowers.  As if once that relationship is built, the kid will never stomp off furious about the bizarre rhythms in Two Grenadiers, and the other one won't be in tears over the slurs in the Vivaldi Concerto that just don't make sense even though they did 6 months ago, and I won't ever get tired.

The wall may be built and covered with pretty flowers, but there are definitely  thorns and they stick us every day.  We'll keep on going, because the flowers are worth it. 

Getting Started

The boys played in a show at a House Concert last night.  I had never been to a house concert and didn't know what to expect.  It was wonderful!  There were kids there!  There were families!  There were people asking about playing music with kids, as families!  About how to get started...



I'm going to write a couple blog posts about getting started.  I'm going to start with the youngest audience, babies and toddlers.  

Here's what worked for us:

• Play lots of music at home, all different kinds of music, all the time.  Play your favorite music for your kids.  It will become their favorite music!  Dance, sing, and act silly.  Play music in the car.  Sing songs while you walk, work, and play.

•  Sign up for a Music Together class.  We loved these!  They're so much fun.  The music is good and generally based on folk songs.  There are songs in Spanish.  Best of all, it teaches (completely through play) really sound basic music concepts like pitch and rhythm.  There are other early childhood classes and they are probably good too, but this is the one we have experience with.

•  Go see live music.  Bring the kids.  Get them up front so they can watch the musicians.  Let their early experiences with music show them that music is something that real people make, not just something that comes out of a box.  Better yet, take them to see kids playing real music.  Kids get really inspired by other kids!

• Take the batteries out of all the plastic toys that play "music".  Don't listen to bad kid music.  You deserve better and so do your kids.  There's a lot of awesome kid music out there.  Check out Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell.  Throw away the Baby Einstein CDs that you got at your baby shower.  There have been studies done that showed that kids that listen to these are less musical than kids who don't.

•  Keep the TV off.  If you need screen time to take a shower, buy a Dan Zanes concert DVD, or a concert DVD of your favorite band.  Gus's favorites were the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen's Seeger Sessions.  I can definitely still see the influences.

• Fill the toy box with instruments.  Let your kids play them until they break, then replace them with better ones.

• Learn how to play an instrument yourself.  

• Go to music festivals

 

• Stay unplugged.  If they don't have video games they won't play them.  Maybe, if you're lucky, they'll pick up those instruments that you have strewn about the house instead.  

I hope you find this helpful.  It was certainly fun pulling out all these old pictures!

Smoked Country Jam 2012 - Festival Days

5 days of music, 5 days of camping, hanging out by the campfire, talking to friends.  The 9th annual Smoked Country Jam took place last weekend at the Quiet Oaks Campground in Cross Forks, PA.  We've been to 6 of them, starting when Gus was 2 and Huck was an infant.  This is where Gus saw his first fiddle and learned his first fiddle tune.  As soon as we arrived, Theresa handed us a copy of this newspaper.  Wow!  That's a lot of newspaper article!  I thought they just needed some quotes for an article about Smoked Country Jam.  I wasn't sure what to make of it at first.  In fact, I didn't get brave enough to read it until almost a day later.  I still feel a little bit sheepish about it, but I think some really good things came of it.  The article highlighted our family's 100 day, turned 450 day and still rolling, practice challenge.  I think there is a whole blog post lurking about that topic, so I'll save it for later. 

In the meantime here are some pictures of our favorite things about Smoked Country Jam 2012:

  learning a new fiddle tune,

relaxing and watching the music,

 cooking hot dogs on the campfire,

 warming up by the big fire,

 sharing our favorite festival with Grammy and Papa Fred,

 being disappointed to not win the Chinese auction, and then getting a gift from one of the Chinese auction winners,

 watching the music with a new buddy,

and staying up way too late every night.

This year Gus was honored to play on stage with Mama Corn, the Poe Valley Troubadours, and the Hillbilly Gypsies.  I'll post some audio files and video as soon as I get unpacked and find the video camera.
 

Day 351 and the Prize

My last post ended with a cliffhanger.  Will Mom come through with a reward for Huck for practicing every day for 350 days or will he be disappointed?  I couldn't leave you hanging.  I was a little worried myself.  Although we had given the kids trinkets for minor milestones and gifts at 100 days, we had nothing for 350 days.  Should I call Dad at work and ask him to purchase a Lego set on the way home?  I couldn't because we had been invited by some new friends for dinner and he would be late already.  So there wouldn't be a reward.  Huck would just have to be satisfied with his accomplishment.
Or would he?

What is an appropriate reward anyway?  What would be worthy of his effort? 

Reward-less, unless you count the lovely pineapple dessert that the kids had made, we went to have dinner with our new friends, David and Christine.  Their house was full of instruments, recording equipment, and a real record player.  The kids were amazed.  What could be better?  

Well, they found out after dinner.  We got out our instruments and started playing Reuben's Train, Huck's favorite song.  At the first solo break David jumped up and pushed the record button on the big old reel-to-reel recording system that took up an entire wall of the room.  Huck belted out the words into the microphone, thrilled to watch the needle go up and down on the display.  Gus stomped and cranked out solo after solo.  Christine laid down some awesome rhythm on drums and David played guitar and piano simultaneously.  Eric and I kept strumming on the chords.  We sang through the lyrics and played instrumental verse after instrumental verse.  Then we did it all over again.  When we ran out of steam, David rewound the reel-to-reel, adjusted the mix, and played it back for us.  There was a actual recording of Huck singing Huck's favorite song, backed by a real band and his family.  What reward could be better than that?


When Huck went to bed last night he said, "Tomorrow I want to paint my face and play music all day."  What could be better than that?

Day 350 Practice Challenge! Exclusive interviews!

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.
Paul Simon

 
Today is day 350 of our practice challenge.  The challenge was to practice every day for 100 days.  Then we extended for another 100 days, then another.  At first we celebrated every milestone, 10 days, 25 days...  Now we don't really pay much attention except on the big numbers, like 350.

In honor of our 350th consequetive day of practice, this blog provides an exclusive interview with Gus (8) and Huck (6), the boys who have practiced every day for the last 350 days!

What kind of music do you like to play?
Gus -  Bluegrass, classical, fiddle, Celtic, Old-Time.
Huck - Suzuki and fiddle


What is your favorite song?
Gus - My favorite classical song is Pachelbel's Canon.  I don't really have a favorite fiddle tune.  I like them all.  My favorite family band song is Mountain Roads.
Huck - I don't really know

What is the hardest song you ever learned?
Gus - Orange Blossom Special was pretty hard.  It took a long time to learn. I was walking around the house playing little parts of it until I got it.
Huck - Minuet 2

What do you want to learn?
Gus - More songs.


Huck - I want to finish Minuet 3.

What is your favorite part of playing music?
Gus - Jamming and playing with my family and friends.
Huck - Playing alone.

How did you get started on your practice challenge?
Gus - One of my friends had started a practice challenge and invited us to do it with them.  I thought it was a pretty cool idea so my family and I decided to give it a try.


How did the practice challenge change the way you practiced and played music?
Gus - Practicing for 100 days really increased my skills.  Before I did the practice challenge I often missed days and the rest of my family missed even more days.
Huck - Before I did the practice challenge, sometimes we skipped days, but Mommy got the idea of a practice challenge.

If it was a 100 day practice challenge, how did you end up at 350 days?
Gus - After we hit 100 days we decided to add another hundred.
Huck - I just decided that I should keep going.

Why?
Gus - Because we had gotten used to practicing every day.  So once we hit 200, we kept going.
Huck - Because it was fun not skipping days and it was fun keeping score of how many days we'd practiced without stopping.

What about days when you are sick or just don't feel like practicing?
Gus - Whats amazing how I've managed to do it even when I'm sick and I don't ever really feel like not practicing.  Something is always driving me to hit a bigger number in the practice challenge, like 400, 700.
Huck - I don't care that I don't feel good.  I just practice.


What kinds of things can you do now that you couldn't do 350 days ago?
Gus - Play the 2nd song in Suzuki Book 4, play banjo, play guitar.  Also my family and I can play songs together.  I've learned a lot of new fiddle tunes, probably by at least 30 songs.
Huck - I couldn't play Minuet 1.  I couldn't play Old Joe Clark.  I could only play 2 songs with family band.  But now I play many more than two.

Banjo?
Gus - Its fun.  I just got a new capo for it yesterday so that we can play in a key other than G. 

Can you offer any advice to someone who wants to get better at an instrument?
Gus - Practice every day and go to Bluegrass festivals.  Take lessons from a master.  
Huck - Yes, its your decision if you want practice a lot or not.  That's why we did the practice challenge and not skip any days because that gets you a whole lot of practice.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
Gus - a musician and an inventor
Huck - a musician and I want to design rockets too and design playgrounds like Daddy.

Is there going to a prize at the end of the challenge?
Gus - Maybe when we get to 400 we're going to go for lots of bike rides.
Huck -  Yes, I think we should have a prize today.  350 is a really big goal!  You should do it and not tell me.

Any suggestions? 



 

Winter Dreaming

What am I thinking about as I practice today?  What am I showing the kids to get them excited about their practice?  Why bother anyway?
The answer to all of these questions:  Summer music events 
That's how we got started doing this in the first place.  We attended our first bluegrass festival on a whim with two very small children.  It was a blast!  At the time, none of us played instruments.

This is a picture from our second year at Smoked Country Jam.  We brought friends!

When we got home, Gus ran a garden hose to his backyard playground.  It was his cord.  He proceeded to MC and perform his own bluegrass festival on his ukulele.    
The next year we brought friends, and added another festival, Remington Ride.  There is so much inspiration at festivals!  Not just music on the stage, but music everywhere:  around every campfire, at instrument workshops, backstage, onstage.

 

We set a goal of being able to play a couple songs around the campfire the next year.  I don't think we accomplished the goal, but the kids did.
The next year we finally picked up some instruments and by the end of the summer were able to play a couple songs around the campfire.
We've kept on going to festivals.   At the festivals last year we all went to jams and instrument specific clinics, and played around the campfire a whole lot. 

If you're lucky you run into the Hillbilly Gypsies Backstage

In addition to festivals, we attend some great music camps, but I'll save those for another post.  For today, I'm just remembering the festivals we've been too, and checking out web pages for some that we've never been too....and dreaming summer music dreams.


 

Inspiring kids..with other kids

Kids LOVE to see other kids playing music.  We get trapped into a mode of equating kid's music with practice and lessons and work.  Given the chance, kids will make music into play.  For the little kids it looks like so much fun.  They just can't wait to join in.

My boys are used to being the youngest at any music event, and they are pleased to get to be the "big kids" for a change.  They're proud to show a younger cousin how to strum a washboard or hold a ukulele.

 

And there's nothing like an adoring audience to keep a young fiddler playing, and playing,

 

and playing.  A stranger approached me as Gus played for these adorable little boys.  She said that Gus was making such an impression on them that he could change their lives.  I had never thought about it that way, but it makes sense.  Gus plays fiddle because when he was four he saw a five year old friend playing a tiny violin.  He knew at that moment that he would be a fiddle player.  And he is.