How do you know when your child has done enough repetitions?
How do you know when your child has done enough repetitions?
The biggest learning curve for parents when teaching their child music in the beginning is understanding how much repetition to actually do.
To give you a frame of reference, Dr. Suzuki made all of his students practice something 10,000 times well for it to be even considered a “skill”. The important word here is “well”. It must be practiced well.
When you are a parent practicing at home, its really easy to think, hey, I’ve done 20 bow holds a day every day for 1 week. Thats 140 bow holds. Thats so many….shouldn’t that be enough?
Ultimately, your teacher is the professional on being able to tell if something has become a skill or not. But, you as the parent have to also learn to be able to tell as well. After all, you are the teacher at home.
Here are some tips for you as a parent to help gauge your child’s skill success.
1. When you are uncomfortable watching or listening to your child, it’s not a skill yet.
When you are watching your child try to do a Mississippi stop stop, and it looks very uncomfortable for them, you usually get really uncomfortable too. Think about the difference you feel in your own body when you watch someone professional playing the violin, versus a beginner. If you haven’t done that before, do that now. Go look up Itzhak Perlman on YouTube, watch how effortlessly he plays, and the ease you feel in your body. Then, when you practice with your child, see if you feel the same, or if you hold tension somewhere. If you are holding tension somewhere, that usually means your child is struggling with something. If your child is playing with ease, then your body will feel at ease too!
Take your child’s sound for example. If you hear scratches, squeaks, and crunches, your shoulders might tense up watching them. Maybe you start clenching your jaw. Maybe your body gets stiff, or you start shortening your breath. Maybe its even that you don’t want to listen to them play anymore! Those are immediate signs that your child has not perfected that skill yet, and they need further repetition and guidance. This does not mean that your child is failing, it is simply data for you to gather. More practice must still be done!
Imagine your child is struggling with having a straight bow. You’ve been working on it for a while, and now finally they are getting the hang of it. Watch them play their song. If you are watching their bow, expecting it to go crooked at any moment, looking for glimmers of a crooked bow or a straight bow, thinking, “are they going to make it through the whole song without any crooked bows?”, then it’s not a skill yet. You’re still practicing. If you watch them play with a straight bow, you barely have to check if it’s straight or not because its so expected that it will stay straight, then it has become a skill.
Reading your child’s body energy immediately transfers into your own. Think about when you hear your baby cry, and your body reacts in some sort of way. Maybe its anxiety, maybe it’s tension, maybe it’s the need to go tend to them, maybe it’s hoping they will stop, maybe its sadness of hearing them be sad as well. Whatever it is, your body reacts to your child’s feelings. The same will happen with the violin, especially the more you learn as a parent.
2. Independence is key.
Can your child perform this skill with your reminders? Can your child perform this skill without your physical touch help, your verbal cues, or waving hands? Can your child do the skill automatically? These are essential to seeing if your child has truly learned and executed the skill.
If you are still reaching for their violin to help adjust their posture, it is not a skill yet. If you are still giving them bow hold reminders, it is not a habit yet. If they still need reminders about anything physical or aural, then they still need more practice.
If you are unsure about your child’s independence, start your practice with you silent, and your hands behind your back. The only words you are allowed to say are what piece they will play, or what task to perform. Example: Play Twinkle. Allow your child to play, and you just observe. What went wrong? What did you want to fix so badly? What did you hear? All of those observations should gear your practice for the day and for the week, since they are also probably things your teacher has told you to work on. And let me tell you a secret—your teacher will never be mad if you work on fixing technique for the week instead of learning new notes to a new song. Your teacher will be THRILLED.
If your child is even more beginner and cannot even play anything on their violin yet, the same exercise can still apply. Can they hold their violin by themselves without your help? Can they make a bow hold with our your help? If not, it’s not a skill yet. More practice must be done! Repetition and consistency is always key.
3. Can they fix the problem themselves?
This can apply to a couple different situations.
1. If they themselves are doing something wrong, can they fix it? Example: “Johnny, your pinky isn’t curved on your bow hold, can you curve it?” If they curve it themselves without your physical touch, put it in the right place, then you know you’re almost at skill level! This means they have learned the body awareness, know how to correct it, and know what it means for it to actually be correct.
2. Can they identify the problem themselves? Example: They just finished playing Twinkle. You ask, “what should we fix when we do it again? What could you do better next time?” If they respond with things like “I heard scratches, so next time I want to work on having a better sound.” Then they are able to identify problems and have that self awareness to fix the issues. If they respond with “I don’t know” or “I thought it was good”, then they haven’t learned that self awareness. In violin, there is always something to work on, and your child should also practice with intention. That means, playing, assessing, making a new goal.
3. Can they identify a problem in someone else and tell them how to fix it, and identify when its right? Example: You, as the parent, make the bow hold. Your child should be able to help you make a fantastic bow hold. The game “Violin Doctor” is great to help your child with this awareness. Do something completely wrong on the violin, and ask them how to fix it. Just like a doctor, they should be able to “diagnose” the situation (tell you what’s wrong), and then give you the “medicine” (telling you how to fix it).
These are things that you and your child need to work on to help build that self awareness. The more your child has this self awareness, the quicker they can fix things in the future, and improve quicker.
4. Can you distract them and have the skill still be present?
This is basically a “before” and “after” type situation for you to be able to assess. Can they play twinkle by themselves no problem? If the answer is yes, its time to check and see if it’s a skill yet. You add in the ultimate test— distraction.
Have them play with the accompaniment CD, if you have someone who can play a duet with them add in a duet part, or even make them do something as simple as do a knee bend on every open A. Even have them play for their grandparents, or walk around the room as they play their favorite review song. If they are still able to play as well as they did with no distractions, then congratulations, its a skill now!
I learned this very well when it actually came to training my dog, Parker. I took Parker to the Suzuki equivalent of Dog-Training. We had a private lesson, and a group lesson, and as much as it was about training Parker to do the skills, it was mainly about the trainer training me, the parent, to help Parker succeed. Very Suzuki-esque, right?
My dog training was 6 weeks of on-leash training, and 6 weeks of off-leash training. I immediately translated this into, hey, this is like when you are training the Suzuki Child’s bow arm, holding their elbow to help with a straight bow, and then letting go of their elbow months later to see if they can bow on their own! My dog trainer explained that it is useless to teach your dog to sit, stay, come, heel, etc, unless you can use it in functioning situations. For example, if you have your dog off leash, and they come when you say, “come”, that’s fantastic, but when it’s really important is when there is a car coming and you need your dog to come to you immediately, or there is a dog fight in the dog park and you want your dog to leave that situation immediately and come to you.
Well, that happened. Parker was playing at the dog park, and was playing in a pack of about 8 dogs. Suddenly, 2 other dogs got a little over-excited and broke out into a dog fight. Parker was nearby them, getting caught in the cross-fire, and I panicked. I yelled, “Parker, come!” And our weeks training paid off in a real life situation; he came to me as soon as he heard the command, leaving the very volatile situation, while I was standing hundreds of yards away, as all the other dog parents ran to their dogs trying to grab on to collars and putting themselves and their dogs in a very dangerous situation.
Now, this is just an example of how our skills that we build are so that we can apply them to real-life situations. In violin, it’s so that our child can play with a piano (distraction) and play at a recital (crowd=more distraction). It’s so that they can play in an ensemble with other violins (other musical parts=distraction) and also watch a leader (more distraction). It’s so that we can add on new skills (for example, layering on musicality and dynamics=more distraction) and make things better.
5. Review Song time should be minimal.
Depending on where you are in the repertoire, if you’ve passed Twinkle, you have some amount of review to do, whether its 1 song or 17. Your review should take anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. On average to give you a better frame of reference, if you play about 5 review songs, that should take 5-10 minutes. If it takes longer than that and you have to spend time working really hard on something in your review, you’ve either lost the skill, or maybe it was never really truly built in the first place.
Example: Let’s say you passed Long Long Ago (Book 1). You played it with no mistakes, beautiful sound, great posture and technique. But the next week, there are scratches, squeaks, note mistakes, etc. If it takes you more than 2x to get it back to passing level, or “star level”, there is your clue that you’ve lost the skill to play the piece with ease, and it was never truly solidified.
Second Example: Let’s say you just started working on bow holds. Minimal time here still applies, but apply it to how long each bow hold takes. Have your child make a bow hold; did that take 3 seconds? 5? 15? 1 minute? Anything over 3 seconds means they are still working and fixing. 3 seconds or less proves it’s automatic.
The time that you spend on your review should be minimal because it’s about maintenance. It’s about making sure that your child can still perform the new technique that you worked so hard on, and that will give them tools in their toolbox to be able to progress to newer and harder pieces. Violin is an extremely cumulative instrument. If you don’t have the basic skills, then you have nothing to build on top of. This is essentially why we practice review. We are checking our foundation to see if we can build further with ease.
Use this list to check in on yourself as a parent, and your child in their learning process. If you go through this list and see that your child is not independent at his or her skills yet, and you are unsure about how to help them proceed, ask your teacher. Your teacher will help guide you! But, it all really comes down to 2 simple things: repetition, and consistency.