It has been a while since my last post here, what happened to us?! LOTS!
Life became to busy and I became too exhausted to keep blogging about it.
However I have great things to report :).
-We DID finish successfully our 100 Days of Piano Practice!!
-We in fact colored about 4 Hundreds Club charts during this process.
-We learned an 'off the record' piece in a month from one of my son's favorite movie, which has helped so much to keep him motivated.
-We have helped motivate 2 more friends to take piano lessons :).
-We are half way Book 1 already-yaay!
-Big A is learning how to read music!
So we have been 'good' busy :).
We are currently working on Au Claire de la Lune and we have a recital coming up this weekend.
Regarding technique, we are still working on:
- a good posture,
-curved fingers,
-counting notes.
It seems like we have been working for a long time on those points but have made, perhaps, a slow progress, not sure why.
What I like to do is to take one of those points a day or a week and work during our whole routine on just focusing on one point, either play every piece keeping in mind a good back/feet posture, or keep our focus on curved fingers/dot on thumb during the whole routine, or counting the notes of every piece so big A doesn't rush to every piece.
I have found out that this helps both of us to manage each issue in a none overwhelming way, however Consistency is the key word.
To remind myself, I like write our focus for the week or the day on the top of our chart, in that way we'll know what to work on.
I was reading today some of the Parents questions in the Suzuki Forum website regarding how long is it OK for a child to practice. I remember I use to ask myself that question a while ago, I don't even ask myself that anymore. I think that asking ourselves 'how long should we do this?' makes the music practice sound like a chore or like a time-out, where you set a timer and you will do it until the timer goes off. I understand that there is several ways to parent while practicing the Suzuki method, but allow me to explain my point. When big A and I started our Suzuki journey our teacher advised us to practice a 'good 15 to 20 minutes', in her words, but she also explained that in order to get those 'good 15 to 20 minutes of practice' we probably needed to spend 40 minutes practicing. Back then big A was about 3 and a half years old and his attention span was a challenge. I remember I set up the timer and try to practice with him, it seems like we were both looking constantly the timer to see if it was close to be done so needless to say that the focus was on the Time but not on the Practice.
After we did our 100 Days of Piano Practice, I discovered that it was a lot more effective to set up a goal for the day and work towards that, so it could take us 20 minutes or one hour to get there but we would have something more useful to focus on rather than just the time.
This way of approaching our daily practice made possible for big A to make big leaps in his learning process. Which also helps him to see results on a timely manner and keep him motivated.
What have you found out makes practicing easier?
