Learning how to interact during that critical moment when you discuss music education with your children to maximize conversion from interest to involvement.

Even though many music stores provide marvelous guidance for sizing, your role in helping your children acquire equipment that will lead to their success is equally important.

Learning how to set up your room so your children can focus on both you and their music is critical to successful engagement.

Maximize effectiveness and efficiency when planning your lesson each day, which should relate to the previous day’s topics and progress before moving on to new concepts or skills.

Print your lesson structure and show it to your children, as it should resemble the same sequence daily to reinforce repetition during practice.

Expose the bowing rhythms and bowing styles [using open strings], key centers, and necessary finger patterns [including extensions and shifts], being sure to model appropriately and challenge your children to rely upon aural memory quickly.

Learn how to create an environment that facilitates the consistent development of passion and persistence with every action you take.

Due to potential cognitive overload, memorization is the best way to teach your children to discriminate their efforts. Turn off the reading requirement, and turn on the aural perception and the sense of touch, and you won’t believe what happens next!

Understanding and clearly articulating the geography of the fingerboard is one of the most effective ways to accelerate your children’s progress.

The “show me how” method is the foundation of successful instruction. Learn how to demonstrate [on each instrument!] at a mastery level of example or use the video demonstrations on our site…your children will immediately have the “I get it, let me try it” response/urge.

Learn to master the art of believing in your children’s ability to move forward and convey it daily with genuine verbal reward.

Teaching the pursuit of beauty to every child ushers them into a moment of inspiration, power, intensity, subtlety, complexity, and all those incredible reactions we have that language can’t describe.

Movement is a visual cue for musicians who play together, so coordinate rhythmic activities and help each child find greater muscular freedom by avoiding rigid posture.

Refining this skill is your primary task and the most direct route to assisting each child’s struggle to overcome obstacles. Your children will come to welcome your honest and precise evaluation of their efforts, as they know it is ultimately bringing them closer to mastery.

There is no shorter cut to mastery than repetition, which has as its motive the refinement of the skill, concept, or passage in question. Research has proven that the successful repetition of the skill with a minimum of three accurate reps is necessary to secure ownership.

Remember that “the slower you go, the quicker you’ll get there,” as glossing over problems make them permanent. Learn how to go slow while keeping your children engaged.

Don’t forget that instrumental forms of music evolved from song, and if you want to raise your children’s perception of pitch, they must sing/hum the material in question…you will be amazed by the progress they suddenly will make.

Learn to assure your children that the greater their struggle, the nearer they are to the goal. Avoiding the problem delays progress and causes frustration to increase, leading to greater muscular and psychological tension.

Learn how to teach each child to believe in their innate ability to succeed to help silence the negative voices within their minds—their body is listening.

Learn to determine points along the way to mastery that deserve a reward to enable daily recognition of genuine progress, a major motivator for children.

Remember your mentors, and trust those you respect for their proven success. Reach out to those people when you encounter frustration or doubt in your teaching abilities. You will take away new gems every time.

Envision you and your children achieving marvelous things together in your mind’s eye, and do so with the accompanying emotions that would be present in such moments….it is simply incalculable what powers there are in dreams and imagination.

Learn the power of the spiral curriculum, which is simply presenting one concept at a time, accompanied by daily modeling and repetition, and securing that concept/skill before layering another skill upon it.

Learn to help your children realize that their eyes see blocks of information on the printed page of sheet music, not just single notes at a time.