Principles:
1. Everyone can Learn.
No matter what age you are, young or old, anyone can learn an instrument.
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2. The Beginning/starting out
Patience is key. It takes time for a student to improve and achieve their musical goal. Everyone's learning ability is at different levels. Some will be fast, some will take time. Success isn't immediate! Just like art, to have a masterpiece, one must have the focus and patience to create a beautiful art piece. A baby never gives up when they start learning to walk. They wobble, fall and get up again. Persistence is key.
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3. Parental Support
As parents, they are the best specialists and home teacher for student-appropriate learning. To create a successful education, it's the parents' responsibility to build a nurturing environment.
- be involved with their practices. Show that you care about their progress but patience!
- Practice with your child every day. Find a time of day that would fit into their daily schedule.
- Your child learns at their own pace, just like learning to walk and talk. Rushing them won't help.
- Allocate enough time for daily practices and avoid distractions around them during their practice time.
- Ability to concentrate. Difficult and complex tasks can only be mastered when one fully strives to do so. Even when several different things need to be improved, we should avoid trying to fix everything at once. All young beginners will be overwhelmed and become quickly frustrated if they are expected to concentrate on posture, intonation, air speed, air control, tone, and expression, finger and hand coordination, articulation, all at the same time.
- A harmonic musical development requires consequence paired with encouragement. You should always follow your intention to open the world of music for your child with the same persistence as you do in other areas, just like having and needing to eat 3 meals a day, every day. It is a part of life that things do not always run smoothly. But do not give up! It is important to be persistent when pursuing long-term goals.
- Please acknowledge your child's hard work. Praise them when they do as much as they can. They will gain confidence and will persist to do better.
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4. Listen & Learn
- From the begining, all students should listen to music every day to develop an awareness for beautiful tone, clear rhythm, proper intonation, and musical expressiveness. One cannot learn a language if they haven't heard what it sounds like. With something to refer to, students will learn to mimic and be better. Always model and make references to professionals who play pieces in which students are working on.
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5. Observation & Imitation (discovery)
At a young age, children have a remarkable ability to imitate based on their senses: sight, hear and feel. They follow movements of music and imitate and repeat. With music it works the same way. They will question their own ability and try to figure out how to improve themselves, how to position themself, or control the tongue so the articulation can be clearer.
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6. Review & Internalize
Repetition exercises and pieces help improve music making. Just like writing, we learn the alphabets, then use it to construct words, then sentences, paragraph and then creative essays or stories. Scales, exercises work the same way and is applied towards pieces and repertoire. It helps with gradual expansion of concentration, memory, hand/air coordination and help improve performance abilities.
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7. The Stimulating Environment
Dear parents, your own relationship to music has a substantial impact on how your child will learn. Can your child sense a sincere interest and enthusiasm for music in you? The creation of a stimulating musical environment will not only benefit your child, it will maximize the learning process. It is not all about learning an instrument to gain and skip levels to achieve goals for university or private school application. When a child understand themselves and how their body coordinate and work with their instrument, their music performance will naturally soar.
♦ Play music of high quality for your child regularly and mixing up the different styles: classic, jazz, gospel, etc.
♦ Take your child to observe and listen to other children play music.
♦ Accompany your child to student recitals, music festivals, workshops and concerts in the community or ones your teacher may tell you about
♦ Improvise small home concerts for relatives &friends, or for the other parent who cannot regularly attend lessons.
Your active support is absolutely necessary if you want your child to experience the world of music at an early age. Music will not only enrich your child’s life, it will awaken a sense for order, harmony and beauty to everyone involved.
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8. Group/Ensemble work
Children learn from each other through mutual support and mutual observation. As older students become role models, younger students would want to imitate. Group lessons provide them with a sense of responsibility, contributing to self-esteem. Younger students learn by example from older, more skillful players--sometimes more efficiently than they learn from the teacher!
Working together in a small group provide a supportive environment for performance practices, ensemble skills, performance poise, social skills, and positive memories. The weekly review of familiar repertoire and preview of more advanced pieces in group lessons are strong support for home-practice motivation.