Piano Lessons Tulsa | How Parents Can Help Practice
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
The next thing that I want to spend a bunch of time talking about in this podcast is the importance of parents helping their students at home. So we have a lot of young piano students because piano is one of those instruments that a student can learn at any age. Really not just in adult guitars, a little bit harder for children because their fingers are not quite as developed. It don’t have the finger dexterity you could say to hold those strings down and play at the same exact time.
So one of the things that we can do is we can have the parents help the students at home, especially on the piano because it’s really important for parents to be involved, especially if they have a young kid because young kids really need that sort of help and push at home a lot of times to practice and to be motivated to practice after piano lessons Tulsa. It’s a six year old kid is not going to go home and want to practice on his own. So he needs help from his parents. So we, I just recently did some research on how parents can help their kids practice.
The piano at home after piano lessons Tulsa. And this is specific to piano, like I said, because the guitar is a lot harder for young kids. Guitars mostly played by older students, although we do have a handful of younger guitar students around the age of 10 to 12 here at critic music Academy. But for the most part our young students that need help from their parents would be for the piano. So that’s why we created this document to talk about how parents can help their kids practice the piano at home. So I’m going to go through those list of this list of things. There’s 11 things on here and I just want to talk about a little bit of each of them.
I’m here as we go along. So one of them is that we want to set a specific time each day for practicing and stick to that time. So when you get home from your piano lessons Tulsa, piano lessons, typically, whether this one actually applies to guitar or piano, but when you get home parenting to set a specific practice time for their students. So if they want to practice three days a week, you should say that you know, your kids get home at three o’clock in the afternoon, so practice time should begin a four to four 30 and we’re going to do this religiously three or four times a week.
So if you have a schedule, it’s a lot easier to stick to. So we found a lot of parents who will get home and their kid doesn’t really want to practice but should and they just don’t really know when. So one of the best ways that you can consistently practice and make sure that your kids are up to practicing and things of that nature is by sending a specific time each day and sticking to it. Once you start taking off of things, once you start skipping, stopping, practicing, whatever it is, it’s so much easier to keep going and definitely is a slippery slope. I like to tell myself that’s not, I like to tell myself that if I just skip once, it’s going to be fine, but it truly is a slippery slope when it comes to this.
So it’s important that you do stick to the practice time that you set and don’t let it, you know, slip by except for in case of emergency pretty much. So that’s number one. It’s really important to do. The second thing is that you can be encouraging and positive by making practicing something fun.So we’ve had a lot of parents who don’t really know how to interact with their kid while they’re practicing. But making it fun and being engaged in their practice time is one of the most important things that a parent can do to help their kid practice. If you can make it a fun activity, which is not easy, it’s much easier said than done.
But if you are capable as a parent of two, making practicing the piano, a fun activity, it is going to be so much easier for you and for your students to practice. They’re going to want to practice because you are making a fun and you’ve made an effort to make it fun. So that’s one of the biggest things that you can do is make it, make it a fun activity. Make it something that is not boring, but something that’s exciting and enjoyable.And one way that you can make this exciting and enjoyable would be number three, sitting with the student while they practice and being engaged in what they’re working on.
So in other words, don’t send your parents, don’t send your kid upstairs to piano by themselves and expect them to sit down for 30 minutes and practice. For most students, they do so much better and they thrive in practicing when their parent is sitting next to them and their parent is engaged in what they’re doing. So this means, yeah, like I said, means sitting with them at the piano. If that is, it means playing a game with them or something of that nature, it really just means being engaged, asking questions about this song, asking them to play you certain fun pieces, asking them to do things that would make their practice time a lot more fun and a lot less boring.
So that’s something that you should do while being engaged would be number four. Praise them for their progress and make an effort to compliment their work. So if you are sitting in your student three or four with your student three or four times a week, as they practice, you’re going to notice the things that they are working on and the things that they’ve, they’ve progressed in because students do make a ton of progress. Even if it’s just small progress. Like we said, we want to praise and lift up our students in the individual things that they’re doing, the small things. But even if it’s just something like mastering those couple of measures in this one song they’ve had a hard time with. If you are constantly in there and you’re engaged in their piano lessons Tulsa, you’re going to notice when they get those right and being a supportive, doing things that are having, you shouldn’t do things that are praiseworthy.