Learning to Play a Musical Instrument: Challenges and Benefits for Your Child At Riverside Music Studios we always try to make the learning experience as fun and engaging as possible. With children we incorporate imaginative play-based activities that inspire the love for music while building real instrumental technique. We work very hard during each lesson to keep our young students motivated, but let’s be honest, learning to play piano, violin, or guitar is indeed very challenging for children! It is not uncommon that a child goes through the periods of not wanting to continue with the lessons, thinking it’s too hard or ‘boring.’ In fact, it is totally normal to feel like that for a child. So what does the parent need to do when the child is protesting against the lessons? The first thing we recommend is to talk directly to your music teacher. A simple change of songs, perhaps to a jazzy or a popular song that your kid really likes can often do the trick. Doing more improvisation and composition during the lesson is another sure way to reignite the child’s interest. And maybe you just need to invest in more colorful “Great Job!” stickers or a once-a-month treat for good home practicing. These are the easy solutions that may very well work for your child. But there is also some harder work that the parents have to do: helping with home practicing, acknowledging the progress, showing up for lessons and performances, and generally supporting the child along the way of learning to make music. Please remember that no matter how talented your child is, he or she can never learn to play an instrument completely without your help. Did Beethoven’s parents help him practice when he was little? Yes! His father was on it every day. And the same with Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and any other great musician you can think of. Even if you are not planning for a career of a professional musician for your child, the benefits of musical education are undeniable. At Riverside Music Studios we are always happy to hear from the parents about their children doing better at school after starting the music lessons. Here are some quotes from the latest scientific research about the benefits of music training. Hopefully this will give you more reasoning to help and work together with your child: 1. Elisabeth Spelke, a professor at Harvard University showed in her research that children with music training have better map-reading and geometry abilities. In her study, she showed that infants as young as four months can associate lengths of sounds to the length of visual objects. In this research, she used tones of different lengths with corresponding cartoon worm sizes. “If an infant hears music, the melodic processing may lead to new forms of visual processing,” Spelke said. “This may form the basis for the relationship between math and music later on.” 2. A research conducted by Michael Possner, a professor at the University of Oregon, showed the positive effects of music training on attention, self control and general intelligence. By using neuroimaging, he found that attention-controlled tasks contribute to the development of a child’s attention network, which leads to an increase of “fluid intelligence and IQ”. His research provides evidence that a child who is able to sustain attention and control for longer periods than other children of his age, has more developed language and reasoning abilities (so-called far transfer abilities). He considered music training as an activity that could have this effect on children. 3. The recent study of the College Board, the institution that oversees the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT, showed that students who are regularly taking music lessons scored, on average, 51 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and 39 points higher on the math portion than non-musician students. riversidemusicstudios/
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 19:48:36 +0000
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