Music Education #4 Getting Through Repetitive Practice Cheerfully

Here are some more practice tips I am discovering while practicing with my very littlest ones:

Getting a piece learned and polished takes a lot of repetition, and consequently takes some wise strategies so little kids don't feel like practice with Mom is deadly dull. These may take a few minutes longer, but the quality of practice goes up- it's worth it.

1. Break the desired section down into tiny, reachable goals. For every perfect repetition, draw a tally mark. For five tallies, reward him by drawing a train car on a large, durable sheet of paper. Let him choose the kind of train car it should be. Soon you will have a sprawling freight train (hopefully you are OK with line drawings) replete with tank cars, aquarium cars, circus cars, box cars, basketball cars, volcano cars... (yes, spewing lava.) I suppose this would work for little girls, too, though they might prefer you to draw jewelry on a princess or something like that, depending on the little girl. The handy thing about this is you can decide what a tally stands for.

2. Hold up ten fingers and say, "You are the farmer. We will repeat this section ten times, and for every perfect time you play this little bit, you will plant a seed." (he plays the little bit perfectly.) "Good job! Ok, you planted a bean seed. Knock down the first finger!" He gently pushes down one of your fingers and you have nine left. After the next section you say, "You planted a watermelon seed!" and he knocks down the second, and so on. It is good for him to knock it down, because it takes his hand off the keyboard, and he has to keep placing it there again so he really gets to know where his hand is supposed to play for that part! Different seeds you could "plant" are tree seeds or flower seeds, etc.. Not only are they learning how to play the piano, they might be hearing about parsnips, dogwoods and hydrangeas for the first time. If it isn't a good repetition, I say, "Hmm, that seed didn't sound like it's going to grow into the strongest tree- let's try again."

3. I set my figurines (the ones that I mentioned in the previous Music Education post), the metronome and any other cars or dollies available on one side of the piano. "Now play it for Mozart... Now, play it for Benny... Now play it for Bach... Now play it with Mr. Metronome," (he has a personality too: he nods and shakes his head and gives hugs. Otherwise, he just clicks.) When they have played the section for each of these entities, they have it pretty well lodged in their minds, especially when the imaginary listeners have been giving feedback. -Yes, Mr. Beethoven is still Mr. Opposite! He encourages them to keep notes that were stuck in their memories incorrectly, and they wake up to what it means to play it perfectly in a hurry!