The Three R's: Respond, Respect & Restrict
RESPOND to the music for yourself, not for your child.
Musical Reasons:
- The solidness of sound and quality of expression depend on every person’s unaffected, unguarded, spontaneous response.
- In singing solfege, rhythm activities, reading exercises and all other lessons, respond to the music as musically as you can, for yourself! Your child will “feel” and “see” your freedom and respond for himself or herself.
- A truly successful class is one in which everyone, parents, teachers and children respond naturally and improves musically week after week.
Psychological Reasons:
- When you respond for your child, you teach your child to respond the way you think he or she should respond.
- Your son or daughter needs to be encouraged to respond freely – Without any apprehension about being right or wrong in your eyes.
- When you respond for your child or expect a specific response from him or her, your child’s attention focuses on your approval and not on the lesson.
Developmental Reasons:
- You are the first and foremost role model for your child.
- Your son or daughter’s ability to accomplish musical tasks depends on is willingness to repeat patterns many times over. If you are also willing to repeat the patterns (and your child can “see” your willingness!), skill development will become accelerated and more effective.
RESPECT the physical way your child learns and grows.
Musical Reasons:
- How well you understand and appreciate your child’s normal natural growth rate will determine how well you and your child progress.
- Don’t over-estimate what your child can do on keyboards and don’t under-estimate the sophisticated ear development taking place in your child at this age Trust your son or daughter’s ability to learn many musical skills in the group setting.
Psychological Reasons:
- If you want your child to take learning cues from you, you must take learning cues from him or her.
- Watch and listen for how your child learns. Then provide the kind of emotional support to make that learning the most effective possible – for both of you. You may still use “adult” ways for yourself, but try to get the “child’s feeling” for learning, too.
Developmental Reasons:
- Your child tries and your child imitates – that’s the true developmental learning process.
- To fully develop sensory motor coordination, your child needs to have many successful repetitions of physical patterning before he or she can be expected to label the patterns or explain what he or she is doing.
- If you interrupt your child’s physical concentration with intellectual questioning, you’ll be depriving your child of his or her best learning tool.
RESTRICT adult chatter so your child can concentrate.
Musical Reasons:
- Your child’s ear needs to be free to “ hear” the new language – Music – with its rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns given by the teacher.
- The highest priority in musical training is listening. If you talk during ear training sessions, you will interfere with your child’s ability to hear this language and to acquire the necessary motor skills to sing and play it.
Psychological Reasons:
- Give your child the freedom to learn.
- At times it will seem easier for you to explain the teacher’s instructions than it will be for you to let your child learn on his or her own.
- Remain quiet, especially when the teacher is giving ear training sessions at the keyboard. In the learning process, we want your child to learn to trust his or her own ears – so they become musically independent.
Developmental Reasons:
- Your words can be static, interfering with your child’s “reception” of the teacher’s “signals”.
- Think of the teacher as the transmitter of musical patterns and cues. Your child is the receiver.
- Your oral interpretations of the teacher’s directions, cues, and patterning are like microwave signals that lock or distort your child’s reception. This interference “short circuits” the transmission of musical information your child needs to become musically sure of himself or herself.
