Keeping going

My posting on this site has slowed down recently because, as you may know from reading my other site, we've recently moved to Taiwan. This has been an upheaval and, I have to admit, a serious challenge to my son's piano practice. A piano isn't the kind of instrument you can take anywhere, and we decided that we would ship our piano here rather than sell it and buy another when we arrived. Consequently, my son hasn't had a proper acoustic piano to practice on for several weeks now.

In an earlier post I wrote about how it was important when you start out to buy the best instrument you can afford because this impacts the quality of learning your child experiences. I warned against hiring a tutor who teaches on an acoustic piano but allows your child to practice on a digital piano at home. Now that we've been keeping our son's practice going until his piano arrives with the use of a digital one, I can safely echo the advice I gave earlier. There are many things that my son learned to do that he simply can't practice using a different kind of instrument, such as playing legato and echoes. While it's been better than nothing, using a digital piano has reinforced my understanding of how it is a completely different instrument from an acoustic piano, and the perceived similarities are merely surface appearances.

From our experiences, I can give some tips as to how to keep going if you're moving house or even just going on holiday.

DO

• Define a practice location in your accommodation. This helps reinforce the idea that practising is an important part of everyday life.
• Stick to your normal routine as much as possible. Practising an instrument should be like a habit - don't get out of the habit!
• Carry on learning. It can be tempting to put progress on hold until circumstances improve, but for many children one of their greatest pleasures is learning new songs. Don't deprive your child of a sense of progress and achievement.
• Maintain musical interest. It easy to ignore those aspects of life that support learning and motivation, but continuing to listen to music, watch performances and read about composers are some of the easiest activities to sustain.

DON'T

• Substitute a poorer quality instrument if you can avoid it. Some piano shops will hire out pianos for practice, or if you're very lucky your hotel may have one in the lounge!
• Delay finding another teacher. It's taken us some time to locate the possibilities in our area, and minimising the break between lessons is ideal.
• Forget to allow for practice time every day (or however often is normal for your family). This is very easily done when other routines are disrupted.

Continuing to work with your child in their musical education can be challenging when your everyday lives are temporarily or permanently changed. One positive thing to come out of this is the knowledge that if you can manage to maintain good habits during these times, then you're on a steady path for the future.

Cultivating an interest in music.

A genuine interest in and love of music can be one of the best motivators in a child's musical education, and of course, a source of inspiration and pleasure throughout their lives. If you're playing the target musical pieces constantly in the background, as is wise, it can be easy to sometimes forget that there are a lot of other excellent examples of musicianship your children can learn from and enjoy. Parents often start with the famous classical pieces that were written specifically for children, such as Peter and the Wolf

and The Carnival of The Animals

But there is no reason why any other classical piece cannot be played for your children's enjoyment.

It is said that if you want your child to read, read yourself. I believe the same applies to music. It is difficult to encourage musical appreciation and understanding in a vaccuum. Similarly, if no one shows an interest in your child's playing, they will understandably be less inclined to play. So, if you want your child to have a good attitude to music, the answer is to lead by example.

Listening at Home
In our household, we're in the habit of always playing music in the background at family dinner times. Not only does this expose my son to good quality music, it also teaches him that enjoying music is a normal part of everyday life. Sometimes the music is a topic of conversation too; usually it's our appreciation of it or occasionally why we want to turn it off! But the idea behind this habit is that my son's musical interest is being fostered.

Of course, you needn't confine background music to any particular time of day. I have only instituted evening meal listening time to ensure that we heard some music every day. Another possibility, and something else we do, is to always play classical music stations on the car radio. Whenever there is no other background noise to compete with there is an opportunity to put on something beautiful. At the very least, it improves your quality of life.


Attending concerts and operas
The next time, (or perhaps the first time!), you attend a classical concert or operatic performance, take your child along with you. We generally don't give children much credit for their ability to enjoy classical music and opera. In fact, we give them the message that it is difficult, boring and inaccessible, by dumbing things down to their 'level'. In my experience, with the right preparation, children can successfully attend and enjoy sophisticated musical events from a young age, certainly from the age of eight with most children.

The key to not having a child squirming in their seat and embarrassing you by loudly asking when it will be time to go, is to prepare the child properly for the event. For example, when my son was 5, a performance of The Magic Flute was coming to my town. We had three months or so to go before the performance, so I bought a couple of dvds of the opera and started to sit down and watch it myself. My son was initially just interested in just one or two parts, such as the Queen of the Night's arias, but as I watched it several times and explained the story to him, he became genuinely interested in the whole opera.

These are the versions we have: this one and this one.

As the performance date drew nearer we explained to my son that we had tickets to go and see it live and emphasised what an important occasion it would be. On the night, we all got dressed in our best clothes and went to the performance with a view to leaving at the interval, thinking that would be quite enough for a 5 year old. In fact, not only was my son amazingly and unusually quiet (we had bought tickets towards the back of the theatre to make a quick exit if he became noisy) he actually wanted to stay and see the rest of the performance!

Lives of the Composers
Children understand and are interested in concrete things that are relevant to their lives. Abstract thinking is something that develops with time. As adults, we know that the music we hear has been written by a real person who had, or still has, a real life. It can be of great interest to children to find out about the composers of the pieces  they are listening to and learning to play. Just a little research into Mozart's or Beethoven's life reveals many interesting facts, and even things such as the fact that a composer was a child once with brothers and sisters, and that they had lessons and practiced too, can be a revelation to a child.

Why Beethoven Threw the Stew is a good example of a book that provides some interesting tales. It can also help to have portraits of composers on display, or watch films based on their lives, though 'Amadeus' is apparently not  historically accurate!

In short, your child's musical education need not be , and should not be, confined to the music they play. There is a world of listening for them that will enhance their playing, help them relate what they do to the wider world, and give them enormous pleasure.

Keeping up with the other children

One of the best things about learning a musical instrument using the Suzuki method is that usually your child will be learning in a community of children and parents, all with the same goal. Part of the learning process is to sit in on another child's lesson, so that the exposure to another child's playing and instruction can enhance the learning process. So much of Suzuki is listening! Also, the local Suzuki association will often organise one or two concerts a year, plus workshops. So there is plenty of opportunity for parents and children to hear and see what other children are doing.

Similarly, in a more traditional environment, such as school music lessons, the school orchestra, or when studying for music exams, children and parents can, if they wish to, compare their experience and achievement with others.

These opportunities to share in musical learning are usually beneficial for many reasons. There is a sense of community, the chance to share tips or offload concerns and worries, and the pleasure of hearing others play, to name but a few. Sometimes, however, there is a more negative side to this situation.

Parents want the best for their children, particularly the parents who go to the trouble and expense of providing them with a musical education. Children also want to do their best and not feel as though they are worse at anything than their peers. We all approach learning with baggage from previous experiences, our individual personality traits and our pre-formed expectations of what will happen. Unfortunately, any of these factors can occasionally cause things to go awry.

Personally, I had a crisis of confidence when my son started sitting in on lessons with a girl about a year younger than him. She had an older sister who was also learning to play the piano so she had been exposed to everything her sister had done, as well as the endless hours of hearing the Suzuki CDs. Consequently, she progressed very quickly until she caught up with my son and they are now roughly at the same stage in terms of the songs they have learned.

My son is naturally competitive and noticed very quickly that this little girl was learning new songs far more quickly than he had done. He also had that perception of an age hierarchy that is instilled in children in mainstream education, so was disturbed to realise that a younger child was 'catching up' with him. On top of this, because I lack a musical background, I also lack confidence in my ability to guide my son through this process. The result was my son spiralling down into a mire of self-doubt and unhappiness over his playing, compounded by feedback from a concerned mother who was convinced that somehow she was to blame for his apparent lack of progress.

I became convinced that I should pull my son out of his learning programme, because it was clearly becoming detrimental to his self-esteem, and practice sessions were becoming tortuous ordeals, very far from the enjoyable industry that is the ideal. I had failed. After a rather emotional email to his teacher, asking for help, we had a long talk about how children progress at different rates and her perception of what he had achieved so far, and also about how parents can unconsciously influence their children's feelings about their learning.

It wasn't a good time for either of us, but I feel it was so helpful to my son and me in the long run. I learned not to mirror back a negative attitude to learning and to concentrate on praising the things my son could do, not to worry about what he couldn't do. I stopped acknowledging his comparisons of himself and this other child and concentrated on making his practice as much fun as I could.

I now understand that learning anything is not an even path. Sometimes we struggle uphill and the going is slow, other times we are racing downhill at a pace. There is no predicting when these times will come. Sometimes many months of patient repetition pays off all at once. Other times the progress is by such small steps that achievement arrives almost unnoticed.

I've found it helpful not to think in terms of the number of songs learned when it comes to my son's musical acquisition. Each time that a child or adult practises, as long as it is a striving, purposeful practice, then that is one step forward. Whether the effects of that practice are immediate and noticeable or not doesn't matter. When learning an instrument, there is so much to learn in terms of technique, knowledge of the instrument, and general musical knowledge, that to think in terms of simply learning more and more complex songs is deceiving and prosaic.

For children, though, this is often how they measure their progress and maintain interest. The novelty of a new song is preferable to improving technique while playing an old song. It is something simple and easy to understand, some tangible evidence of the work they have done. If a child is focusing excessively on number of songs learnt, this means they don't perceive or value the other ways that they progress.

I realised with my son that something I could do to develop his perspective on his work was to make apparent the results that he had achieved. These days, I take time to talk things through with him before and sometimes during practice. He knows what he's doing and why, and could write his own practice schedule now if he had to (though he would probably be shorter than the one indicated by his teacher!) I also keep recordings of performances and parts of practice sessions, so that in years to come he'll be able to see how far he's come and how well his hard work has paid off.

Holiday piano times

Many music teachers who teach children don't offer lessons during the school holidays, and for us this brings its difficulties and its pleasures. I'm not the most confident Suzuki parent so continuing practice times without a teacher's assessment of progress and her guidance tends to leave me worrying that I'm doing everything wrong. On the other hand we are also less constrained by the teacher's direction on what should be done.

Holidays bring a relaxing of tight schedules and an element of  freedom over the direction that practice takes. I try to reassure myself that even if I fail to spot errors or take my son down the wrong path, the teacher can always correct my mistakes when lessons recommence. I don't have to be perfect!

We have reincorporated a listening task/game that we used to do when my son first started to play. His teacher calls it note hunt. In its original form, the child chooses a particular note, say for example C. Then he or she turns their back and the parent plays a C. The child then has to guess which C it was. The reward can be a decreasing number of points according to how many guesses the child needs, or gold, silver or bronze medals (imaginary!). Three tries is normally sufficient.

My son loved playing this game and awarded himself increasing numbers of points, trying to beat previous scores. (Basically, anythng that temotely resembles a computer game is a major motivator for him.) Of course, the idea is that it helps the child learn to concentrate on differentiating between the notes. My son ended up giving himself millions of points for a first time correct guess.

Just recently we've been playing a slightly different version where he chooses any key and he has to guess which note I've  played in that key in a particular octave. We're doing this because at the moment he's learning the different scales. As always, his knowledge is greater than mine and he has to show me which notes are played in that key in the first place, but we manage. In fact, I think he takes pride in the fact that he knows the keys better than me.

So, we're currently enjoying this opportunity to our own thing for a little while.

Listening and watching

We've recently incorporated a new item in my son's piano practice time. He loves going on the computer, so I thought that an opportunity to embed some computer time into practice would be seen in a positive light. The way I did it was to add a listening section, where he can go to the computer and choose one thing to watch on Youtube. Of course, I have to steer him away from Sonic the Hedgehog episodes, so he has a set category that he can search in. So far, we have done famous composers and famous pianists. Famous composers lasted us a few weeks as he worked through the ones that he knows. (He can choose one each week, so he sees a selection of their works).

One thing he really likes to watch are these graphical representations of the pieces:

They're called graphical score animations. I can't vouch for the quality of the music, but as something that may be of interest to more visually-oriented minds, I can recommend them. They're interesting because you can see what's about to come up just before it's played. My son has great fun anticipating a loud crescendo!

Once we've exhausted the known composers and pianists (our knowledge isn't extensive), we'll move onto the different types of music: sonatas, nocturnes, concertos etc. Another possibility is pieces in a chosen key. Those should keep us going for a while. At the moment this is the most enjoyable part of my son's practice. Once he's done what he has to do, some form of Twinkle, the next thing he always chooses is listening. In doing this, he's quickly building his musical knowledge, and hopefully coming to appreciate that there's a wide world of music out there to explore and participate in.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

The process by which we learn a new skill is still something of a mystery to scientists. I've been reading this book recently: The Genius in All of Us. It's quite a cheesy title for what is a very interesting book, about the respective roles of genes and environment in shaping our abilities as we grow. One thing that's clear from reading it is that there is still so much that is unknown about exactly what it is that makes us so different from each other in the things we can and can't do, and the extent to which we're able to practise those abilities.

It seems, according to the author, David Shenk, that much of what we believe to be determined by genes, such as intelligence, talent and personality traits, are shaped much more by our environment and experiences than we are aware. Mr Shenk cites numerous example of people who are believed to have God-given gifts, who in fact won their supreme achievements through favourable environments and sheer bloody hard work.

Yet exactly what's happening in the brain during the period of learning and honing those skills, and how the brain responds to what's happening in the body, is nowhere near clear to those working on those mysteries. What is known, is that prolonged periods - the current thinking is 10,000 hours - of dedicated practice of the desired skill will result in mastery of it. It's important to note that it must be the right kind of practice. Mindlessly going through the routine won't do it. It must be the kind of practice where the person either pushes themselves or is pushed constantly into new challenges. Never complacent, the student must reach constantly beyond his grasp.

This was brought to my mind today as I was watching my son doing his Sunday Repetoire performance. Every Sunday he'll play through all the pieces he's learned, using a lucky dip of lolly sticks with the song titles written on. For some reason, things fell into place today. He remembered and used most of the little polishing points that he's learned for each song, which for him is something of an unusual occurence. Usually he rather unthinkingly plays them through if he isn't prompted to try to remember.

What's got me puzzled is: why today? What was different about today that helped him to concentrate more? Or was it just that the penny had finally dropped, after practising those points so many times; that something had slotted into place in his brain; that enough hours had been done? When I figure out the answer to that I'll be phoning those scientists up.

We're currently working on a Kurtag book for reading. I have to confess that I'm a Philistine when it comes to this. I just wait for the pain to end and try to smile. My son is learning to read Let's Be Silly which occurs about halfway through this performance:

This is how it looks on the page:

Of course, my son loves to be silly, so has great fun with this. I appreciate our wise piano teacher's understanding of how to make music appeal to young children, but what about the parents, that's what I want to know. What about the parents?

Progress report

We're having good times at the moment. It's a school holiday here in the UK, which means that we can have piano time in the morning when my son isn't tired after a long school day. He concentrates much better, gets less frustrated and is more interested in what he's doing. We've also got a new practice sheet that shows a spider in a web!

As you can see, the practice points go around the outside and a portion of the web gets filled in as each point is covered. There are lots of flies caught in the web but the ones that are free are fighting for their friends with missiles!

We're working on learning the minor scales at the moment. My son learns them by starting with the first note, then working his way up by listening to what sounds right. As a non-musical person, it's quite amazing to me how one set of notes will sound right and even one out of place sounds wrong. I know there's an explanation for this but the fact is that even without knowing why, we can all independently and without having been taught, agree on what sounds correct and what doesn't. Humans are a quite remarkable species.

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this to audiences regularly:

An added interest to practice is my son's teacher's use of this site: http://www.dropbox.com/ She uploads video demonstrations of practice points for her students to use. It's extremely useful to view these during piano time. Of course there's the novelty of doing something a bit different, but my son's piano teacher is the one who can play the piano, I can't. It's so much easier to simply show him a video than try to explain what the desired goal is.

I was really disappointed not to be able to get tickets to this:

World-renowned concert pianist Lang Lang invited children to audition to play in a special concert of fifty grand pianos on stage at once. Five hundred children sent in videos of themselves playing and one hundred were chosen. The title of the endeavour was 'Lang Lang Inspires'. I imagine all those children participating and watching the event will be enormously inspired to continue with their learning and enjoyment of music.

Inspiring children to compose

When children are learning to play an instrument, parents are often reluctant to let them just play around with it. They may be worried that the child may damage the instrument and many musical instruments, even beginner ones, can be quite expensive. They may also worry that the child may not take their studies seriously if they're encouraged to simply have fun. Yet I believe that composition and improvisation, or as your child will see it, simply playing, is one of the best parts of practice time.

One thing that I hope I've made clear throughout all my posts on this subject is that it's important that children practice mostly because they want to, not because they're being forced to. Now, of course there will be times when the child initially doesn't want to practice. That's understandable. I don't always want to cook the dinner, but once I've started I'm fine. So it may be that quite frequently a child will need a little nudge to begin with. Once they're into their practice session, though, ideally a child should be interested and enjoying it enough to put some effort into playing well.

One thing that can be the 'fun' part of practice can be simply playing the instrument by making things up. Children can then really experiment with sounds and the effects of how they play. They can let their imagination roam free and really express how they feel. (I have to confess there have been some times when my son has apparently been rather grumpy and fed up with practicing, according to what I've heard in his improvisations!) They can feel as though this part of practice is entirely under their control, and that it is something they're doing to please themselves.

Some children will baulk when faced with a carte blanche opportunity though. They need some sort of minimal guide, or some kind of starting point, to spark their inspiration. Some ideas for inspiring a child to compose are:

• Choose an animal and play the way it sounds. The parent has to guess the animal.
• Play a story with different characters (Peter and the Wolf is a great starting point for this idea)
• Choose five notes in an octave and play using only those notes
• Play with your hands crossed over
• Choose a favourite character and play their tune
• Play a particular emotion (or a series) again for the parent to guess
• Play the black notes only
• Use any part of your body to play - palms, forearms, elbows, forehead, feet
• If your child has a favourite musician or type of music, play like......
• A lucky dip of random words

As you can see, there are many ways to give a child ideas on composing their own music. Here's my son having fun:

It's important to always be 100% positive about your child's efforts. There is no right or wrong, after all, and it can be crushing to receive criticism for something you've created as a personal expression. I've found that over time my son's attempts have become more musical and coordinated without me imposing my advice. I think his compositions are one of the parts of his practice that he listens to most intently and learns the most from.

Composition

I came across this webpage recently, which discusses how to teach composition to piano students. It occurred to me, is it really necessary or possible to teach composition? Can we actually teach people how to be creative? I think there are often attempts to do this - courses on teaching people how to write fiction, or how to paint - but ultimately what actually happens is that the student is taught how to mould their efforts into an already recognised and accepted structure. What is taught is convention, not how to create something new and different, nor how to express that unique individual's persona.

We always incorporate composition into my son's practice. Depending on his mood, this can form the largest or smallest part of the session. Sometimes he'll really enjoy himself and create something pleasant to listen to, other times you can clearly hear him saying 'why do I have to do this again!' through the keys.

Of course, it isn't enough just to say to a child: right, compose something. For a start, if composition hasn't been built into practice sessions right from the beginning, the child will be confused. They will be used to learning how to play other people's songs, which, once they've mastered them, sound quite good. Faced with the prospect of playing something of their own, they might not know where to start. Also, some children (and some adults!) find creating something from a blank slate quite daunting. How will they know if what they're doing is right?

The answer to that is there is no 'right'. If a person expresses themselves in some kind of creation, who are we to say whether it is 'correct' or not. It simply is. Whether it's beautiful, or pleasing, or meaningful to others are the questions that we can attempt to answer, if we want to, but there is no need to take that path with children's exploration of music until they want to.

Trying to convince a child of this is not always easy, though. Children are brought up to obey, follow instructions and learn. We try, often as part of 'good' parenting, to suppress their natural impulses. This is a great shame because children are the most naturally wonderful creators of all human beings, in their play and discovery of the world around them. This is why I believe that allowing them free rein on the piano during composition is paramount. If the child's natural impulse is thwarted, what they're doing ceases to be a true expression of themselves and instead, like so many aspects of children's lives, becomes another thing under the control of an adult.

In our efforts to make learning the piano something that children enjoy and want to do, we can use composition as an opportunity to hand control over to them completely. Some children may find this daunting, but there are ways we can spark them off and help them feel safe that I'll talk about in my next post.

Emotional ups and downs

Had an interesting practice today. One of my goals with my son is to encourage him to listen to himself as he plays, and to take some ownership of his learning. I think it will be an important step for him to take control. I'd really like him to feel as though he's doing this for the enjoyment that he gets out of it, and a sense of satisfaction and achievement. It's probably a lot to ask of a seven year old who, let's face it, would rather be on the computer for most of his waking day, given the choice!

Anyway, today we were working on The Happy Farmer so I had another bash at this little plan of mine, and asked him to listen out for ways he could make it sound even better. We often do this and he resists - he doesn't like thinking about anything, he just wants to play and have fun - so I usually end up making suggestions. Today I persisted, though, and hit upon the idea of asking him to play a part of the song in two different ways, then decide which one sounded better and think about why that was. Success! After a little to-ing and fro-ing he decided he could play the chords on the left hand more legato and that would sound better.

Now I'm interested to see what happens tomorrow - will he be better at remembering this little piece of polishing because he thought of it himself? We'll see.

Not all was so good, though. As happens quite often when he's learning a new reading piece (Petite Berceuse in Methode Rose) he felt daunted and overwhelmed and became a little teary. He always manages to play whatever he attempts eventually, though admittedly sometimes it takes quite a while; so I don't really know why he feels this way. This initial feeling makes his final success sweeter I think, but I'd rather he didn't feel this way at all. Hey ho, children are creatures of the moment, I suppose.

To finish, his piano teacher has recommended this performance as an inspirational piece for young piano students:

It'll be a while before we get to this level!

Where we are now

I realised recently that a lot of my time posting on this blog has been spent relating many of the things that have helped me support my son with his learning, and trying to explain the rationale behind much of what we do. Yet when I started writing another of my main intentions was also to record and share the process with others.

So where are we now? We are busy, as always, polishing and honing the songs my son already knows, which is all of Suzuki Piano Book 1, and the first two songs of Book 2. The links are to later versions of the books we actually use. In our, older, versions, Mrs Kataoka plays the pieces. My teacher prefers her playing to later versions because Mrs. Kataoka was taught by Suzuki himself.

The piece my son is currently learning is The Happy Farmer by Schumann. Here is a youtube video of a little girl playing it:

This is a standard piece for students of musical instruments and I particularly like it. For my son, it marks his movement into more complex pieces than the simpler, nursery rhyme-style songs.

This piece has a particular significance for him though. It's also one of the tunes to the film Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. As soon as he heard it on the CD he recognised it immediately. "It's Ponyo on the Cliff!" he shouted. A lot of his motivation to learn the other songs has been driven by his desire to learn to play this one, and his first rendition of the melody (he has still to play both hands together for this song) was great. It demonstrated to me how much of an effect the student's feelings have on performance.

I think it also shows how positive the effect is of a child having a reason to play, a reason supplied by themselves, rather than dictated to them by an adult. After all, very few children would choose to put in lots of hours learning to play an instrument if they had no reason to do so.

So for now we're going well, buoyed up by his pleasure in finally getting to a song he really wants to learn. My next task is to think of a good reason for him to learn the next song!

More tips for making piano practice fun

It occurred to me the other day, that, more than any other aspect of helping my child, the one thing I put the most time and effort into is making his practice sessions at best enjoyable and at worst bearable. For example, over the years I've collected various bright and interesting containers to keep cards, stickers and labels in. This is the first one we started with:

In the top drawer there are laminated cards with 'phrase 1, phrase 2' etc written on them. These are to help him learn songs piece by piece, breaking them down into manageable sections and making the process less overwhelming. His piano teacher informs me that this is a good skill to have: to be able to play a part of a song rather than starting from the beginning and working all the way through. This means that they can focus on just a segment of it at a time. But another advantage is that at those times when your child is feeling like it's all just too difficult, you can say: we'll just look at phrase(s) x today. Of course, yet another advantage is that you introduce an element of fun and interest by presenting them as a lucky dip.

Ah the lucky dip! Suzuki method understands the child's mind so well sometimes. Children want to play, they don't want to learn - or if they do want to learn, they want it to be fun. The times my little boy's motivation and interest has been brought back on track by the anticipation of what he's going to pull out of the lucky dip, I don't care to count. Is it going to be the one he likes, or the one he dreads? The easy one or the difficult one? Even the times that I've been tired, bored and stressed and I've been saying 'Come on, just choose one. It doesn't matter. You've got to do them all in the end anyway' (shame on me!) my son will still insist on making a big deal of which one he chooses, turning it over carefully to reveal............! He understands how interesting it is to anticipate what one he's going to pick, even if my sad adult mind loses track sometimes.

Some more lucky dip containers:

As you can see, they're ex-chocolate containers. One has laminated practice points in it and the other has all the scales that he currently knows (some better than others it has to be said).

If you look back to the first image of the mini-chest of drawers, you can see some lolly sticks in the middle drawer and some picture cards in the bottom one. The lolly sticks each have a song my son knows written on it. The picture cards are a legacy from when he was learning songs but couldn't read. He learned to associate the picture with the song. Some are quite obvious; for example, you can see a picture of a lamb, which represents Mary Had a Little Lamb. Others are less so, such as the picture of piano notes that stands for Suzuki's Allegro. It doesn't really matter what the picture is because the child will make the connection.

You may also be able to make out written on the picture of a lamb the words 'Balance Winner 2010'. This is the result of a competition the songs had last year as to which one could be played with the best balance in the hands. This is a good example of two more ways to make practice more enjoyable. The first is taking the focus off the child. My son's piano teacher is very good at doing this with young children. She will talk to their hands as if they were separate personalities from the child. Not only is this amusing for children, it also absolves them of any responsibility if things don't go well. It's their hands fault, not theirs. Silly hands! So the Balance Competition we held was between the songs, and not implicating my son's ability to play the songs.

The second way in which the competition makes practice more enjoyable is that it, as with the lucky dip, adds an element of interest and suspense. My son loves these competitions. I have to say that he isn't always the best judge when it comes to awarding merit, but he's interested and involved in his practice, and that's so important when you're asking a child to focus and repeat similar exercises day after day. Other things I do include writing down a guess as to which order he will play his Twinkles in, which he then checks to see if I was correct. He's usually extremely pleased to find that I was wrong! Or when he puts a sticker on his practice sheet, I'll close my eyes and guess which one it is. As an adult, it's quite marvellous sometimes to observe how important these little games are to him.

All kinds of surprising little things can spark a child's interest. Here are the gloves my son uses to play glissandos (sliding his fingers over the keys). He loves these gloves:

Of course, these are just things that have worked for us. Each child is different and what works for my son may be meaningless to another child. I think that's one of the greatest benefits I've experienced in going through this process: I've learned so much about my child and what makes him tick. We've also grown close through sharing the lows and highs of his endeavours. My ambition has never been that my child become a concert pianist, only that he does something that is really beneficial to his development both physically and emotionally, but along the way we've both reaped many other rewards.

Setting the Pace

One of the more difficult aspects of supporting your child in their musical journey is knowing how quickly or slowly they should be progressing. There are three people involved in setting the pace for learning: the teacher, the parent and, most important of all, the child. A few posts ago I wrote at length about setting up good habits and developing your child's motivation to play. One thing that has a significant influence on those habits and levels of motivation is your child's perception of what he or she is learning and how quickly.

Nothing will put a child off better than feeling as though they aren't making any progress, that no goals have been achieved. We all need rewards for our efforts, and a sense of achievement is one of the best rewards of all. However, feeling under pressure to progress faster than is comfortable can have a negative effect too. Putting undue pressure on your child may well make them feel that they have no control over their learning, that they're learning only to please others and not themselves, and also that, no matter how hard they try, it is never good enough because someone is always expecting them to do more.

Some of you may be thinking that it's good parenting to have high expectations of your children. After all, children will live up to those expectations, won't they? Also, what's wrong with doing something in order to make a parent or teacher happy? I agree that high expectations can lead a child to perform better and try harder because children are so easily influenced by what others think of them. Tell your child that they're no good and they won't try to be good any more - what's the point of trying to persuade someone who's made their mind up about you? Believe in them and they'll think it's worth believing in themselves.

The point where it's so easy to cross the line, though, is when you give your child the impression that they're learning to play the piano for you and not themselves. As I've said before, the best motivation is that that comes from within. How many of us didn't object to learning at school, only to learning what someone else told us to learn? How much natural curiosity and enthusiasm is destroyed by heavily controlled school curricula? (But that's another story!)

If, as a parent, you express impatience or frustration with your child's progress, as well as associating negative emotions with their learning, they will also feel that they're learning to please you and that you're difficult to please. What a dampener on motivation that must be! Similarly, if you push your child on faster than they naturally progress they'll not only fail to consolidate their new skills, they'll also experience feelings of confusion and ineptitude rather than mastery.

Of course, it can be difficult when your child is in a situation where they see other children who are apparently ahead of them, and let's be honest that as parents it's also a source of comfort and pride to us to know that our child is at least keeping pace with their peers. But the thing to bear in mind is that, as long as your child is practising regularly, they are improving their skills and they're adding more hours to the theoretical 10,000 hours required for mastery of a subject.

We once went through a difficult phase with my son's learning when a child who was a year younger than him suddenly had a period of accelerated learning and caught up to his own stage of progress. He found this very upsetting and it was so detrimental to his feelings about learning to play the piano that I seriously considered giving up. Luckily I turned to his teacher and the most effective piece of advice she gave was to ignore my son when he talked about his feelings of inadequacy compared to this other child. I did so, and when he insisted on an answer I just said that it didn't matter. This attitude turned the tide for us and I realised that by being sympathetic to his upset over this I had been unwittingly feeding into his perception that there was something be upset about.

Teachers can be as guilty as parents for destroying a child's motivation by implying that they aren't progressing quickly enough. I would say that if you have a teacher that doesn't praise your child for their effort alone as well as whatever other small achievements they make, then find another teacher. I am not saying that it's impossible to produce excellence through making a child miserable, but it isn't necessary either. The love of any subject is at least equally as good at producing the effort required to excell, and I think it goes without saying that it's by far the preferable route with no risk of burnout or collapse.

In short, the person who is best at setting the pace for their learning is your child. Of course there will be times when they plateau, and at that point it's important to keep the motivation going by setting simpler goals for them to achieve. There will also be times when they apparently rush through a stage and I think at these times it's best to let them go with it. You can always go back and polish pieces that weren't thoroughly learned. Allow them the pleasure of indulging their enthusiasm.

Playing the piano is a skill that's developed over years, and as long as they're practising playing well, the speed with which they learn the songs in their coursebook isn't important. There is so much more to praise and celebrate than the learning of a new song. Focus your praise on working hard and playing beautifully and allow your child to learn at their own pace.

More books and other aids

Books

Previously I talked about some of the books my son uses to help him learn to read music. Today I'm going to show you some other books that he uses for other aspects of his playing.

Most important of all are, of course, his Suzuki piano books. This is his current book:

Unsurprisingly, his first book was Suzuki Piano School Volume 1. He actually wrote on the front cover of this book 'by Bettey' when he was four. His teacher's name is Betty and he naturally assumed she was the composer!

It's worth pointing out that these books aren't as well thumbed as you might imagine. Suzuki students start off by listening copiously to the CDs of their books, then pick out the first tunes, the 'Twinkles', themselves by ear. All of the Book 1 songs are learned by ear, one hand at a time. It's only once learning and playing by ear is well established that they begin to learn to read music.

We're having a great time with Book 2. There are some catchy tunes in there, which makes hearing them over and over again more bearable. Also, by coincidence, one of them, The Happy Farmer, is the theme music to one of my son's favourite Japanese animated films, Ponyo on the Cliff. He's really looking forward to learning to play this one, and we're just about to start it.

There are also many simple children's books available for learning about musical notation. We've used this one: 

and its partner the Treble Clef Theory book. I like the simple activities for children in these books. Lots of little quizzes and cartoons to keep the child interested. They introduce the basics of musical notation without making it all seem very dry and boring.

Less interesting, but something you may well come across if your child is working towards conventional music awards are books such as this:

This covers much the same material, and more, and in greater depth, than the previous book, but, as I said, it isn't so accessible. I would advise using simpler and more enjoyable workbooks in the beginning at least.

A final book recommended by my son's piano teacher is The Manual of Scales, Broken Chords and Arpeggios. This has been invaluable to me as a non-muscial person in helping my son learn the correct fingerings for scales. He's currently learning them gradually but without this book to refer to I know I would forget what goes where, and it would be a waste of lesson time to relearn them.

Aids

 Perhaps even more motivating than an interesting workbook, here is one of my son's learning aids. (Sadly, this is emptier now than it appears in this photo). The simple reward of a sweet at the end of a practice session, or one for whatever target achieved, has been quite effective for us. These are only small sweets, but he has learned to associate piano practice with something nice and has tangible evidence of the positive consequences of putting some effort into something. This jar sits on top of the piano so also works as a visual reinforcement.

I have also found it worthwhile putting some effort into creating interesting practice records, which my son completes as he practises. I make roughly ten at a time and they each last a week, so I'm changing the design every two and a half months or so. My son works with me to create a new one and I deliberately include him so that he feels as though he's at least partly owning the process of his learning. Here are two we've used:

You will notice that Sonic and Mario are a recurring theme!

He puts stickers or a stamp in each task as it's completed.

We have pages and pages of these, going back years, and occasionally we'll look at them and marvel at all the hard work he's done.

Just lately I designed a new kind of practice sheet as a surprise for him, with dragons attacking his practice boxes. 

I hope this post has given you some ideas for things you can use with your own kids.

Metronome & books for reading music

I thought I'd start this week's blog with a Youtube clip. Sorry about the blurry image. That's a close up of a metronome, and the video is a short introductory presentation by my son on its uses - with a surprise ending! (To those who experience motion sickness, you may want to avoid watching.)

 Here's a better picture of the one we use:

Now I'm not going to claim to be an expert on metronome use. On reading around, it seems that there's a bit of controversy about their use. Do they help or hinder developing a natural rhythm? Do they destroy musicality? These are debates that you'll come across. Instead of giving my opinion, I've found you a good discussion on the history of the metronome and its pros and cons here.

We've only been using a metronome for a little while. My son is quite good with maintaining a consistent rhythm (unless he's fed up and in a hurry of course!) but I think his teacher has asked him to use one to help him keep going at a steady pace when he's reading music and playing. (For those unfamiliar with Suzuki method, the children learn to play by ear and they aren't taught to read music until later.) We're using it with this book:

Apparently this was written by Bartok to help his son learn to play the piano. It starts off very simply and takes the student through a variety of different playing patterns. The most useful thing about it is that it has the metronome speed marked at the top of each exercise piece. It's been fun using this book because my son loves the challenge of trying to keep pace with the metronome and it's provided a little variety in his routine practice sessions. (I should say, we do have to turn the metronome to face away from him or he's distracted by the moving hand.)

Other books we've used for reading are Alan Haughton's Play Piano Book 1 and Methode Rose. Methode Rose was quite difficult to source. If you're interested in using this book its ISMN is 979-05600-5019-5 and it looks like this:

We haven't used the three books in any particular order, completing one before moving on to the next. My son started with Methode Rose, but it gets quite technically difficult quite quickly, so then he went to Alan Haughton's book and worked his way through that. At the moment we're using both the Mikrocosmos and Methode Rose. One thing I would say is that it's been very helpful to really work on a piece and get it very good before moving onto the next one, while of course trying to maintain some kind of variety. Then it's also instructive to go back to the pieces you haven't looked at for a while to see if you can still read and play them well.

Our next book is this:

This is a most strange book and at the moment is completely incomprehensible, so I'm not going to say much more! But if you're looking for something interesting to study, look no further, Kurtag is your man.

More on books next blog

Seating

A quality noted in equestrian circles is whether a rider has 'a good seat'. In other words, do they sit well on a horse? Do they have good balance, posture and poise? All of these are important if you want to ride well. You may or may not be surprised to learn that such things are equally important to the practising pianist. To play the keys in order to make the most beautiful sound, the hands need to be in the correct position over the keys. To maintain this position and to be able to keep the correct balance and the range of movement in the hands without the arms and wrists from becoming strained or tired, the body also needs to be in the correct position.

There is a fairly good guide here, although I would say that in some of the illustrative photos those students look as though their hands aren't far enough over the keys. The principles are that the back is straight, the arms are held out in front of the body roughly at the level of the keyboard (a little above) and the hands are in front of the arms. The body should be relaxed, not rigid, as this will cause tension and strain, and as well as being physically stressful, this strain can be heard in the sound the pianist makes.

Unlike some instruments, it isn't really possible to get pianos that have been made specifically for children to learn on. You can't, for example, buy a quarter-sized piano in the way you can a violin. There are smaller than normal pianos, but you lose keys at both ends of the board. Also, if you want to buy the best piano you can possibly afford as I advised in my previous post, you want it to last throughout your child's childhood at the very least. You don't want to have to buy a larger piano as your child grows.

A child seated at a piano cannot possibly have the maintain the correct relaxed posture and balance without the aid of appropriate seating and a foot rest. You could use cushions to raise your child's seat so that their arms are a little above the keys, but cushions are unstable, and you don't want to waste time continually rearranging them during every practice session. Much better to buy an adjustable seat.

This is ours:

We've had it at its highest setting for quite a while now, just showing that it's mostly my son's legs that have grown! When we bought our piano the dealer agreed to throw this in for the price of the piano, so that might be an idea for your own negotiations (plus free delivery).

Just beneath the seat you can also make out a footrest, shown more clearly here:

This is an adjustable footrest with a pedal extension feature. The company that makes these can be found here. We've found this to be the best option available for providing a secure and stable rest for the feet that can also be adjusted to a fine degree.

These are the main items you'll need for your child to start lessons. In my next post I'll discuss other equipment and items that can also be useful.

What piano?

This is the first in a series of blogs discussing the equipment you'll need for piano tuition.

Piano

Of course, you need a piano if you're learning to play one. But it isn't quite as simple as that.

Many children get given an electronic keyboard as a present and turn up at their first piano lesson raring to go. That's fine if you want to learn to play a keyboard, but a piano is not the same, whatever similarities the two instruments share and even if the keyboard has a 'piano' option. Beware of a piano teacher that's happy to teach your child on a piano and have them practise on a keyboard at home. There are specific techniques required to play a piano so that it makes a beautiful sound. Without being able to practise these techniques at home your child won't be able to learn them. An electronic keyboard simply doesn't respond in the way an acoustic instrument does. If you've ever been to a live classical concert you'll know the difference between that and listening to a recording at home.

This isn't to say that there aren't lots of things you can still learn by playing a keyboard. In fact, there are many things that you can't learn by playing a piano. But please be clear that these are different instruments and if your goal is for your child to be able to play a piano, then you need to start with a piano from the beginning.

Here is our beautiful piano.

As well as using a keyboard, another option is to buy a cheap piano until you're sure your child is really committed to learning. I would advise against this, though. Children, especially young children, are creatures of the moment. They will almost certainly go along with lessons and practice for a little while then try to give up when the novelty wears off. The child prodigy who practices for hours for the love of it is a rare exception (and I'm always a little suspicious of just how much of the motivation to practice comes from the parent). It's best, in my opinion, to begin with your commitment. Your child will pick up on that. If you value the instrument your child is likely to as well. And if you buy a cheap thing 'just in case they give up', you're increasing the chances they will give up.

Also, there is a huge difference in sound between cheap, poorly tuned pianos and well-made, well-cared for ones. If you want your child to hear the difference between playing well and playing badly, they will hear it better on a good quality piano. Don't believe that children are too young to tell the difference. Children are very sensitive to sound, more so than adults. They pick up languages much faster than adults do. They may not be able to articulate what makes something sound bad or beautiful, but they can feel it at a deeper than conscious level. On a good quality piano they can practise to make the best sound they can.

Another drawback of buying a cheap piano is that you're likely to be buying secondhand. I'm not a piano expert but it stands to reason that this is a risky enterprise. How old is the piano you're buying? (Yes, they do have limited lifespans, unlike some other instruments.) Has it been regularly tuned? Do you know what to look for under the lid? Unless you know what you're doing it's wise to steer clear of this potentially dangerous area.

In short, take as much advice as you can, and spend as much as you can afford. It will give your child a great start and make them much more likely to succeed in their endeavours and enjoy making a beautiful sound. Our piano above is a Kawai, which cost us an eye-watering amount of money, but we're still going four years later and the sound of this piano lifts my heart.

Enjoy! Invest!

Why piano?

Or perhaps the first question to answer is, why should my child learn a musical instrument?

Well, some answers to this question are obvious. Children and adults alike derive a great deal of pleasure from playing instruments, from making their own music, and from performing for others. However, to play well takes skill and practice. The younger a child starts to learn an instrument, the more they will learn by the time they've grown up. Also, the younger a child starts, the more the learning becomes an accepted part of their lives. They may simply not remember a time when they didn't play.

Also, playing a musical instrument is considered in many circles to be an accomplishment of a well-rounded individual, along with being able to speak another language and play a sport. While the ability to play an instrument may not be needed for that job or university place you're applying for, it certainly won't look bad on your resume. It's generally accepted that learning an instrument takes dedication and hard work, traits that any employer would be happy to see evidence of. At the same time, it tells others something interesting about you.

However, there are less obvious reasons for encouraging your child to do this. There have been several studies that have shown a correlation between musical study and enhanced performance in other areas. In this study for example, children were given either keyboard or voice lessons and their test scores improved more than those of children who had received no musical tuition. These findings have been replicated in other studies. There does seem to be something about learning an instrument that's good for developing brains.

Of all the musical instruments, though, the piano requires the left and right hands to operate most differently. Were you ever any good at rubbing a circle on your tummy and patting your head at the same time? I was terrible at it and probably still am! I marvel at the way my son plays one thing with one hand and something different with the other. Our tendency is for both our hands to do the same thing at the same time, usually whatever the dominant hand is doing. Requiring different actions from different hands is stimulating to the brain.

From a musical perspective, the piano can form the basic study for any other instrument. A child will learn about rhythms and harmony, and any style of music can be played on the piano. It can also be used to produce a huge variety of sounds. Children tend to find it appealing because they can produce recognisable music from an early stage just by pressing the right notes in the right order, unlike some other instruments that are perhaps more trying to the parent's ear. Probably its only disadvantage is that it isn't as portable as many other instruments, but then you can't have everything!

Making practice fun

Of course, one of the best ways to encourage your child to practice is to ensure they really enjoy it. Yet what child enjoys doing similar things in similar ways day after day? Okay, some children do enjoy this. However, most children easily become bored by repeated activities - unless, of course, they are playing. After all, that is what children do best. So how can we make practice fun? By making it seem like playing.

To do this well you need to think about your child's likes and dislikes. Each child is different and what will appeal to some won't appeal to others. What are your child's favourite characters? Do they like competitions, or puzzles, or stories? Do they like listening, or looking, or doing?

Here are some ideas of things I do or have done with my son to make his practice time more fun.

Practice sheets
We always sit together and work out a new practice sheet every 8 weeks or so. My son chooses the pictures he wants to decorate it with from the internet, and I print off colour copies. Ours are divided into days with separate boxes for different parts of practice. When he completes an activity he puts a little sticker in the box (also chosen by him).

Take a chance
It's fun to introduce an element of risk into piano practice. Of course, nothing life-threatening, but something to take out predictability is good. One thing my son's teacher always advocates (and I think this is standard Suzuki practice) is a lucky dip. It could be for the songs the child knows, the scales they know, or the tasks for that session. Putting them on strips of paper in a bag will have most children in eager speculation about what they will pull out. Will it be the thing they most want to do or the one they weren't looking forward to?

Another thing we do is to roll a dice to decide how often my son should repeat a practice. Say, for example, we've decided that the last two bars of a song need polishing. Rather than me telling him to practise it four times, we'll roll a dice. Sometimes it'll be more than four, sometimes less. Whatever it is, there will be that little bit of excitement and anticipation to spice the lesson up.

Invite a friend
I don't mean a real one (far too distracting!), but a toy figure or puppet or picture to join in and to offer their opinion on what's happening. My son once made me a lovely Mother's Day gift at school of a sunflower head on a stick with some 'I love you' type messages on it. At one point this became part of the practice routine. When my son was playing really beautifully, being very careful and thoughtful about what he was doing, the sunflower would miraculously appear over the piano and start waving about. If his concentration lapsed, the sunflower would start to sink sadly out of sight. Of course, he would sometimes play badly just to control the sunflower, but more often than not he wanted to make it grow.

Have a race
This was an idea suggested by a Suzuki violin teacher and this worked for us. We got two cars and started them at one side of the piano. One was my son's car and one Mum's car. Whenever my son completed a task well, he moved up and Mum's car lagged. If there was something not quite right, Mum's car got to go ahead. Needless to say, I never won! As time went by, more and more obstacles and rules were added to the car race. We really had a great time with this one.

Tell a story
This was another suggestion from the Suzuki teacher I heard talk once. He suggested drawing a path on a small whiteboard, with the different practice tasks represented as obstacles or encounters along the path. Then a figure such as a dragon or a princess has to journey along to their destination (a cave or a castle for example).


There are probably many more ideas you can think of for incorporating the things your child likes or likes doing. I hope this has given you some ideas.

Developing motivation

If you've ever had a brush with education or psychology you may have encountered the terms extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Put simply and according to my layperson's understanding, intrinsic motivation is that feeling or reasoning from within us that compels us to work at something. Extrinsic motivation is the name for the external factors that have the same result. So, you might want to do well in a test because of either the feeling of satisfaction that it gives you (intrinsic motivation) or because you might win a prize (extrinsic motivation). Generally speaking, most studies show that intrinsic motivation is a far more powerful and long-lasting motivator.

What does this mean in terms of your child's piano practice? Well, it means that all your encouragement, praise and rewards are not as strong a motivator for your child as you'd like them to be. While your child naturally values your attention and approbation, and enjoys the sweet at the end of practice, the effect of these will be short-lived. Given the choice between missing out on a sweet but getting to skip practice for once, your child may well choose the latter. In Amy Chu's book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother she recounts an incident where she threatened to give away her daughter's dollhouse to charity if she refused to practice. The girl calmly replied, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?". Tough kid!

In my previous post I discussed some ideas on how to tackle those off days when motivation is low. If your child is only motivated by your promptings and encouragement, these days will be even harder to deal with. Your child has already decided that he or she doesn't value those things highly today, or at least not as high as the opportunity to relax rather than play the piano. If your child has intrinsic motivators to battle the lethargy, though, the chances of winning that battle are greater.

Developing intrinsic motivation is a more difficult and a longer term project than the much easier offerings of praise, encouragement and reward that we routinely (hopefully) give our children in response to their efforts in life. To generate that desire to practice within your child takes a lot of thought and effort.

Self-image
One of our most powerful motivators is our sense of ourselves. We tend to behave in accordance with how we see ourselves. So if we believe we have no self-confidence, we won't act confidently. If we identify with gregarious personalities, we're more likely to be the life and soul of the party.

Similarly, if you subtly encourage your child to see themselves as pianists, this will help develop their intrinsic motivation to practise. Like all children, my son sometimes compares himself unfavourably with his peers in terms of achievement. At these times, I never miss the opportunity to remind him that none of his classmates have been learning to play the piano for three years!

Of course, you can go overboard with this and become tiresome, so it's important not to over-egg the pudding, but a well-placed comment at an opportune moment can be very effective.

Recording achievement
It's important to have record the evidence of your child's successes. While a parent's praise, if genuine, is always valuable, it's ephemeral and easily forgotten when faced with getting over that little hump of apathy. But a visible box of programmes from performances and dvds recording those special achievements - not just concerts but home performances, compositions, reviews, long records of practice etc.  - gives a visual prompt that reminds your child of the pleasure and pride they have experienced previously.

If the box is always visible your child will cease to 'see' it as it will become over-familiar, but it would be a useful thing to bring out at times of low motivation.

A sense of belonging
One aspect of human nature is the desire to belong to a group, whether it be a family, a school, a profession, a company, or even the group of people who don't want to belong to groups! If you're lucky enough to have a musical family, some part of your child's motivation is inbuilt. Unless he or she wishes to reject the family for some reason, your child will have an intrinsic motivation to practise because that's part of your family's lifestyle.

If, like me, your family isn't musical, all is not lost. By following the careers of famous pianists, by watching their performances, interviews with them and documentaries on them, you can give your child a sense that they belong to this group of people who play the piano, that they are part of a great tradition.

Similarly, if you can contact the parents of other children who are learning the piano, either through your child's teacher or their school, it could be possible to form a group with these other children. By organising outings and other social events for them, both they and your child will develop a feeling of belonging to 'the group of children who are learning to play the piano'.

I've left the prospect of joining an orchestra until last because developing pianists are rarely invited to play their instrument in an orchestral setting in the early stages of their development. They would usually be invited to take on another percussion instrument, so it may be that joining an orchestra could be counter-productive in your efforts to develop your child's intrinsic motivation to play the piano.


I hope this has given you some ideas on how to reduce the occurrence of the 'I don't want to practise' days.

Coping with bad moods

Ideally, in order to play well and have tangible evidence of progress, children should practise playing their instrument every day. In my previous post I talked about how setting up good habits can help with this. One thing that regularly interferes with our best intentions is the 'I just don't feel like it' day. You know, the day when you cheat on your diet, just can't make that jog before breakfast, or you have to have a drink or a cigarette to get you through.

Unsurprisingly, children have these days too (though hopefully they don't light up to deal with them). Maybe their best friend has fallen out with them, or the teacher has reprimanded them for something they didn't do, and suddenly it all becomes too much and all they want to do is play a video game to take their minds off it all.

These days can be hard to deal with. Despite all the work you've put in in supporting your child, all the driving to and from lessons and performances and all the money you've paid out for instruments, books and tuition, you're faced with a surly youngster who refuses to budge off the couch. "But I don't feel like it!" "I just want to miss one day, I promise I'll do extra tomorrow!" "You always make me practice when I don't want to. It's not fair!" Every parent of a child learning to play an instrument will have heard these words or a variation of them more than once over the years.

The thing to remember when faced with this situation is that a child in a bad mood is an argument waiting to happen. Your approach needs to be one that avoids that argument at all costs. Why? Perhaps you believe your child is being lazy, self-indulgent or spoiled. Perhaps they are. We all are sometimes, aren't we? But now is not the time to be having that discussion. This is the time for practice and you do not want the subject of the conversation to be diverted into general complaints.

Another reason for avoiding an argument is because you don't want your child to associate practice time with feelings of unhappiness and discord within its family. You also don't want your child to feel that practice is something they are bullied into doing against their will and nor do you want to set up the habit of a ritual argument before each session.

So, how to overcome the 'I don't feel like it' days?

• Stay calm. It takes two to make an argument. This means don't raise your voice, and think about the language you're using and the speed of your speech. It's important not to accuse, berate or blame, and not to interrupt or talk over your child. Doing any of these things is likely to escalate a discussion into an argument. That isn't to say that your child may not do any of these things, but you're the adult here.
• Have positive expectations. Sometimes a child will be signalling to you that they're going to put up a fuss about practising by pointedly lounging around very far from their instrument. However human beings, and especially children, are very suggestible. If you ignore their signals and maintain the attitude that practise is going to happen they will often go along with you with very little prompting. If, instead, you rise to the bait and start wheedling or cajoling then you've already acknowledged 'sides' in a dispute.
• Ignore. A child who has set himself up for a battle of wills is like a ship with the wind taken out of its sails if he gets ignored. If he isn't getting ready for practise, go and do something else until he is ready. (He isn't allowed to turn on the TV or start up a video game, though, as they aren't allowed before practice are they?) If you have set up good habits, your child will feel out of sorts until his normal routine is re-established.
• Be reasonable. If your child really has had a bad day or is feeling ill, it's important to acknowledge their feelings. Practising is not more important than attending to a genuine headache or a bruised ego. A cuddle, a chat and a compromise will leave your child feeling valued, cared for and in some control of his learning. My son and I have decided to shorten his practice on occasion, or to just get started and see how he feels after 15 minutes, or just to do his 'favourite' parts.

Another way of tackling the days when motivation is low is to work hard to encourage high levels of motivation generally. This will be the subject of my next blog.