My friend has a 5-year-old boy, we’ll call him Angelo, who expressed an interest in learning violin. He has a notoriously short attention span (he’s actually mildly autistic) and she was hesitant to commit to lessons from a “real” teacher for this reason, but we got to talking and I said I’d be willing to give him lessons for a little while.
I’ve been playing ever since I was a tiny kid, so I’m used to the discipline of practicing a certain amount of time every day, but I heard somewhere that for small kids you really want to start them off with “okay, in practice time we want to accomplish these things – do these three exercises” and not “okay, you need to practice for ten minutes.” So I really tried to do that with Angelo – I encountered unexpected pushback from his mom (who is also a musician, though not a violinist), who was also raised on the “practice two hours every day” mentality, and tried to do things like setting timers for ten minutes for practice time. I think most of this was miscommunication on my part as to what I wanted Angelo to do, but just last week we straightened it out and the change in Angelo’s whole attitude and his progress in his last lesson was tremendous compared to what it had been!
This makes me think there are probably lots of other things about teaching small kids that I absolutely do not know, as it was random luck that I happened to hear the “accomplish-these-things” rule of practicing. Any tips?
(The other thing I can think of that I try to do is to praise him a lot when he accomplishes something and to tie it to the practicing he’s done in the last week, and to always broadcast through my own attitude and actions that playing the violin is fun, but that seems fairly obvious (and was something my teacher always did for me as well).)