How to Get Your Child to Practice the Violin Without Sugar

A reader of this blog asked me if I had any more good practicing tips, having found my doll concert post helpful in getting her five-year-old to practice. So here is another idea which can be adapted in many situations to make practicing more fun. And here's another picture of my baby playing the violin:

The general principle here is to make the practice a physical journey that the child can visualize and experience kinesthetically. Here are several ways to do that:

1. Create practice cards with location on them. Place them around the house (or outside!) with each card giving the next location. So hand the child a card that says "Bathroom, standing on the toilet." They go to the bathroom, climb on the toilet, and play their first song. There they find a card that says "In the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room." They go there, play their next song, and there they find a card that says "Hall closet." Or whatever. If Mom is traipsing along behind to help with position and pitch, you can't go wrong. After a few times of playing this, let the child be in charge of placing the cards before practice begins. You could even let the child make the cards, place the cards, and *you* be the one who has to find the next card and listen to a piece at each location.

2. If you have, like we have, a bunch of little toy houses and buildings, set up a little journey for a favorite toy or doll. The castle, the pirate ship, the beauty salon, Barbie's house, the treehouse... whatever you have for little destinations. Say, "Now, this Polly Pocket has to go to all of these places today and at each place she's going to hear a different piece of music. When she gets back to the beginning, practice is over." At each destination, the child plays another piece of her practice, and along the way, Polly Pocket can run into all kinds of problems: becoming extremely hungry, getting tired and wanting to give up, being chased by bears, being hounded by Paparazzi, etc. When Polly Pocket gets home, the practice is over: no exceptions! Polly is exhausted. If you need a more tangible variation, have Polly Pocket deliver marbles at each location, or pick up marbles from each destination.

3. A simple, portable version of this involves a little toy frog or bee and a piece of paper, and some tiny stickers. Draw ten (or however many) lily pads (or flowers), with the names of the songs on them... you can have multiple "Minuet 1" lily pads if that one needs to be repeated. When the frog has visited a lily pad, the child can put a sticker on it or color part of it in. There should be seven stickers on each lily pad (or seven petals of the flower colored in) at the end of the week, then the child can turn in the whole thing for a reward. Moving the frog around the paper lets them keep track of their progress and gives them a sense of what's coming up.

I'm sure you can think of lots of other variations on this theme, using the idea that a violin practice can be mobile, visible, tangible, and progress can be marked in space. Be as goofy as possible, and don't worry about "Well, this is working now, but what about next week?" Next week, if you need to, you'll think of something else. Maybe that thing will involve sugar. But most likely, once your child gets accustomed to practicing "with joy" because you're turning yourself inside out to make it fun, you won't need all the bells and whistles to get a good practice. Everything goes in cycles, I have found. If you get yourself through a rough patch by pulling out all the stops with fun games and adventures, you'll find yourself on the other side with a happier child and a new attitude.

Not Very Suzuki At All: Confession of a Burned Out Violin Mom

The Suzuki method is a triangle: the student, the parent, the teacher. For six years of Suzuki I have been an active part of this triangle with Benny and his teachers. I practice with my child, I play my violin along with him, I sit there alert and engaged at the lessons, I drive to group, I take him to workshops, camps, etc. I have put endless hours into this child's music education.

Two weeks ago, I decided I had had enough.

Picture a horse hitched to a stagecoach. The horse's agenda is to go as fast as possible. Never mind the safety of the passengers, the integrity of the coach itself, the driving conditions, the possible turns in the road. Then there's a driver. Her sole purpose is hauling on the reins. That's all she does, just pull back on the reins, with varying levels of frustration and patience, frustration and patience, yank yank yank. Occasionally the driver brings the horse to a halt, climbs down off the coach, and has a heart to heart talk with the horse. She explains all the logical reasons why this breakneck pace is not healthy or conducive to personal growth. During this conversation, the horse nods its head sagely, meanwhile tapping its hoof distractedly. When the stage driver gets back up on the coach again, the horse takes off at the exact same speed as before. Yank, yank, yank.

Horse = Benny. Stage driver = me.

Benny is in book 5. He is playing the third movement of the Vivaldi concerto in G minor. He cannot play this song, he cannot successfully pass this song, by ripping through it at maximum speed again and again. Repetitions at this speed do nothing to help him execute the song. What he needs to do is to slow down to a speed where he can play it absolutely correctly and in tune, and do a thousand repetitions. A thousand? Really? Yes. Suzuki would say, a thousand, in a slow tempo. This trains your hand and brain to correctly do the physical act of playing the song. Then when you take it up to speed, your reflexes take over. If you play it fast, you do not learn to play it right. You learn to play it messy. This is a tough piece, the toughest so far. It's not one he can just talent his way through.

So I said to his teacher, I can't do this anymore, it's so frustrating, I'm in this adversarial situation with my child, it's bleeding into other parts of our day, and I can't do this with joy, I can't approach practice with happiness, when I know that I'm going to fight with him the whole time.

His teacher, bless her heart, told me to take a break, let him practice on his own. That was two weeks ago. So, Benny has been practicing on his own. He is trying. He really is. He has in his mind what mature, independent practicing sounds like. He calls it "self-responsible." If he makes a mistake, he stops, dramatically fixes it, and then goes on. There's a lot of checking intonation with open strings. However, I know that what he's actually doing is teaching himself to play it wrong, and then fix it. You don't learn to play correctly by playing incorrectly and then fixing it, because then when you get to your lesson or in a performance situation, and you can't fix your mistakes, you're just left with the mistakes. Plus you're training your hand to play the wrong note by doing it over and over, regardless of whether you're fixing it or not! Not very Suzuki.

So, here we are. Lesson is tomorrow. He's not being very Suzuki and neither am I. I honestly don't know what the solution is. We can use a metronome, but that involves me standing there enforcing the metronome, measure by measure. Me as enforcer is the dynamic I'm trying to get away from. On the one hand, I want him to learn to practice on his own! When I was nine, I was doing it. On the other hand, I think maybe he isn't capable of practicing on his own yet, and what I'm doing by "taking a break" is just making things worse and being selfish.

I am overthinking it. I am complicating matters. But I just can't get my head around it -- I need help! And may I just say that it doesn't help that Sadie is so easy to practice. Oh yes, the Sadie/teacher/me triangle is fully functional. And maybe that's part of the problem too!

More Suzuki posts: Suzuki violin.