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. 

What We're Practicing Today

We're enjoying a two week break from the boys' Suzuki violin lessons for spring break.  Its not that we don't love our lessons, but the break has certainly been a nice change of pace and I realized today that we're playing a really interesting mix of music right now.

Gus has written chords and melody for a couple of old, old, songs.  He wasn't gentle to his new-chord phobic parents, so we're getting much better at our B minor and F chords.  He picked out two songs:  Harry Bell, a lovely little tune about a guy falling into the saw at a sawmill, and Soldier's Poor Little Boy, about a boy freezing to death in the snow.  Surprisingly they have become some of our favorite family band songs, which is crazy because last week they didn't seem like songs at all, just words on a page.  Gus plays banjo on Harry Bell and has worked up a great solo.  We also played through some of our "old standards" tonight: Country Roads, Brown Eyed Girl, Long Black Veil, Nelly Was a Lady...



Huck has worked so hard on the Bach Minuets in Suzuki Book 1 and he has mastered them!  He wouldn't hear of shelving them for a week so he's played them every day.  He's also putting a lot of effort into getting ready for St. Patrick's Day.  He's learned Swallowtail Jig and Road to Lisdoonvarna and is really hoping that Gus will call him up on stage St. Patrick's Day so he can show them off.


Gus is getting ready for his Suzuki Book 3 graduation but was happy to shelve the Bach Bourree for a week.  He took it out today, shook out the wrinkles, and played it with some enthusiasm that it had gotten lost in all the polishing.  He's also getting Jay Unger's Lover's Waltz ready.  He's always followed his graduation piece with a fast and crazy fiddle tune (Orange Blossom Special last time) so he's going to surprise everyone with a slow pretty one this time.  Gus is working on another project that requires him to solo in the key of B flat.  To get used to the key, we pored over the Fiddler's Fake Book looking for fiddle tunes in that key.  There are precious few.  So we settled on Done Gone, which he hated for a day or two but now its his new favorite song.   If only I found this web page sooner, a whole slew of B flat songs.  He's still enjoying working on Elzic's Farewell, and I still can't keep up with the chords on that one.  And he's brushing up on all his Celtic stuff for St. Patty's Day, particularly the Old Hag set.  And then there's the Seitz in Suzuki Book 4, about as close as Suzuki gets to a hokum bow...

I've been working on these crazy mandolin calisthenics called FFcP and man do they hurt.  They're working though.  My pinky is a much more cooperative part of my hand and I can move the whole exercise to any crazy key that I would've said that I couldn't play in just by following that patterns.  And the chop chords, I'm always working on those.
I'm trying to keep up with my 6 yr old on the jigs, but I think he's passed me up.  I better watch out or the cat might too if I spend too much time blogging when I should be practicing.


That's not all we do on a beautiful March day.  After we practice we go out to play.

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? 



 

Games we play!

How do I get the kids to practice?  

We do two things that make practice easy. 

1. Practice is a habit.  Its a habit because of our 100 day practice challenge (and 200 and 300).  
2. We make practice fun.  Is it always fun?  No.  But we try.

How so we make it fun?  We play games...lots and lots of games.  

What kinds of games? 

All kinds!

Where do we get the games? 

Usually we make them.  I used to spend a lot of time making up games customized with the songs that they are working on, but I've gotten more efficient.  Now to make the games  reusable, I either use numbers and assign the numbers to a particular piece of their practice, or we draw cards.

Gus made this particular game.  We use templates that we find on the internet, like those found on Donna Young's wonderful webpage.

And then either print them out and write on them or, if we're feeling fancy, edit them using Jarnal.  The game pieces are usually lego guys, or precious little bunnies.

I even reuse the game boards for math and reading games.  I keep them in a folder, and rotate them.  We sometimes go weeks without playing one, and some weeks we play one each day.

On particularly tough days, we use a chocolate coin as the game piece, to be eaten when the game is finished.  Its amazing what a little chocolate can accomplish.

Fishing for songs.

Many of the games are very simple.  Just roll 2 dice and the first tells you what song to play and the second tells you how many times to play it.

Some of the games are more involved and take forever, like fishing for paperclipped fish using a magnet on a string.  Fishing is Huck's favorite.  Honestly, it drives me crazy.

But the cat loves it.

The Game gives the assignments, not me!

Monkeys are great for counting songs or repetitions.

 But by far the best way to make practice fun is to play music together.

Day 321 of our 100 Day Practice Challenge - Overcoming the Travel Hurdle

Yep, the title is right.   We started our 100 day practice challenge 321 days ago.  If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a 100 day challenge, I'll explain.  The idea is to practice your instrument for 100 consequetive days.  Almost a year ago, we decided, as a family, to commit ourselves to practicing every day.  This wasn't a huge change for the kids.  They take Suzuki violin and practiced just about every day anyway.  At least I thought they did.  But once we started the challenge I realized that on the busy or difficult days we had often skipped practice.  It was a huge change for Eric and me.  We had been playing guitar and mandolin, respectively, for about half a year, and were averaging about 3 practices a week, usually after the kids were in bed.

So we decided to practice every day for 100 days.  We each picked an exception.  Eric said that it wouldn't count to miss a day if you had to travel and couldn't bring your instrument.  I said that you didn't have to practice if you were sick.  We set a three song minimum.  A day counted if you played three songs, any songs.  We each chose a "prize" for the end of 100 days, and then agreed on a shared prize of a big bike trip together.  

We celebrated lots of little milestones.  We bought a pizza on day 10, baked a cake on day 25, went to an amusement park on day 50, and a movie on day 100.  We still haven't managed a multi-day bike trip, but by the time we got to 100 days we had all realized that the true prize was the music.  We saw huge progress in our playing, but even better, practice had become easy and automatic.

It think it worked because we were all doing it together.  At the beginning of each day, I figured out where practice would fit, and then I made it fit.  At the end of the day we would ask each other if we had all practiced.  We were accountable and all working toward the same goal.

So when we got to 100 days, we kept going, and going, and going.  We celebrate the milestones less and don't notice the challenges much at all.

We've had a ski weekend planned for Huck's birthday for months and I gave the kids the option to use their "travel exception."  They were horrified!  They've made it this far and weren't going to miss a couple days for a ski trip. 

So we packed their violins.  Unfortunately, the guitar and mandolin simply didn't fit, so Mom and Dad used the exception.

Not only did the boys play their 3 song minimum each day, they got to give their Grandparents' a full concert!

Thank goodness for little instruments!

Now we just need to figure out how to pack the instruments for our week-long bike trip this summer.