HELPING YOUR CHILD FORM GOOD PRACTICE HABITS, EVEN WHEN THEY DON'T WANT TO!

Here are some ways you can help your child with practice habits.

First of all, make sure your child has a chair.  Without one, they usually end up sitting on the bed or floor to practice, and this results in poor posture.  Good posture is necessary for good air support!

Second, provide a music stand.  Even the little cheap fold-up wire stands will work.  In a pinch, I have suggested to my students that they prop their music up on an opened drawer in a chest-of-drawers.  They should not try to practice with the music lying flat.  This is another cause of poor posture.

If you really want to help your child be aware of their posture (very important!), buy one of those cheap full-length mirrors at a discount store, and mount it where they can see themselves when they practice.  Taking them to a symphony concert to observe posture is great, too.  The rock-n-rollers they see on television don't always follow good posture rules, they are too busy trying to be cool.

Another "practice necessity" is a set practice time, every day.  This is one of the most overlooked problems in music student failure.  It doesn't have to be a very long time, but daily reinforcement is a must.  If your child practices for 20 minutes a day, they will actually learn far more than if they get in 3 hours on Saturday after the soccer game.  Things they learn with daily reinforcement will go into their long-term memory, instead of short-term.

You see, all people have both kinds of memory.  Your short-term memory is used when you look up a friend's phone number, then remember it long enough to get to the phone to dial it.  Your long-term memory comes into play after you have dialed that friend's phone number every day, for many days in a row, and you can dial it in your sleep.  You will probably, at that point, be able to dial that number until you are my age, and loose whatever kind of memory you ever had.

 *A MESSAGE FROM JEANAN'S SOAPBOX:
The above paragraph explains why block scheduling does not work, and will never work.  Ask any award-winning band or orchestra director if they would rather see their students for 45 minutes every day, or 1 hour and 45 minutes every other day, and they will always choose the 45 minutes per day.  They know that daily reinforcement is a must for real success.  When core-subject teachers start having to take ALL their students to a contest several times a year where they are judged according to the top performing group instead of compared to the minimum standards on a test, they will ditch block scheduling.  They like it now because it gives them extra planning time every week, period.  All the educational foo-foo is what it is, just the latest addition to the ever-growing pile of educational foo-foo that is handed down to us every year. 

OK, back to practice.  You can fully expect your child's interest in music, especially practice, to wax and wane many times during the year.  THIS IS NORMAL.  Don't panic if it seems that he or she is loosing interest after you paid all that money for an instrument.  Stay the course, and keep insisting on that daily practice routine.  Soon, your student's director will probably have some sort of contest, or chair test, that will take care of the problem.  If not, suggest it at a booster meeting.  Perhaps the boosters could provide some prizes. I have seen this done, and the best prizes were gift certificates for a local music store, or pop-music books (especially with play-along CDs, they help with intonation awareness) for young students. 

Finally, be protective of your child's practice time.  You can't expect your child to concentrate on their music if their little brother or sister is watching tv or listening to a loud radio in the same room.  Music students are young, with a short attention span, and they have enough trouble keeping their mind on their studies without any interruptions.

Providing a good practice environment may seem to be just a bother, but those practice rules will pay off in the long run with college scholarship money!  Think of it as a savings account.

Thanks for reading, Jeanan Paul