After school practice

This is the time of day most children practise, in my experience. As I was saying before, lengthening practice time pushed us into the after-school slot. I decided that freedom to practise for as long as he wanted or needed to had the advantage over the better energy levels available in the mornings. Plus, there was no need to wake my son up before he was ready to wake. (We're normally an alarm-free household. We aren't the types to sleep on past the need for it, and if we go to bed at the right time we'll wake up at around the right time in the mornings.) So if my son needed to sleep to 8 o'clock rather than 7.30, then I wouldn't have to wake him up in order to practise.

We started practice time in the afternoons about 18 months ago I think. Of course, nothing is ever perfect. What we lost in pressure to fit practice into a defined time, we gained in level of tiredness. Now he had the time to take his time, so to speak, some evenings, it has to be said, he really wants to get the whole thing over with as fast as possible. He's just too tired or emotional after a long school day to really enjoy his practice or get anything out of it.

Three nights out of five, my son goes to an after school club, where he plays constantly for about an hour and a half. Practice after these days can be particularly hard. I've learned to allow him 15-20 minutes after he gets home to have something to eat, read for a while and generally calm down before he does his practice. Walking in off the street and sitting down in a peaceful and focused frame of mind is just about impossible for him. At the same time, he knows that practice is imminent because, while I'm free and available to help at that time, I make the family dinner when he's finished.

However, nothing other than reading and eating is allowed between coming home and starting practice. While we are creatures of habit, paradoxically we also tend to not want to do something because we know we're supposed to do it. We derive comfort from routines, but we also get sick of them. If my son were to begin another activity before practice, it would be twice as hard for him to stop that and start his practice than if he were doing nothing at all. So there is no TV on, no computer on, nothing to distract him (or me!), and that makes starting so much easier.

To summarise, practising after school has been made easier for us by

• Allowing some time to readjust to the calmer home environment
• Ensuring basic needs are met - food, drink, toilet
• Ensuring distractions such as TVs, computers or video games do not compete for the child's attention
• Freeing up the parent guide from other tasks
• Having a roughly set time to start

At the weekends, and during the holidays, we still do morning practice. For my son, as long as there's no time constraint, he simply focuses better in the mornings, and he knows that once practice is done, he has the day free to do whatever else he wants with his time.

Whether morning or after school practice, we've found that setting particular times of day for this has been very beneficial. In my next post I'll talk about developing good habits.