developing focus in practice
If your child is over five, get a stopwatch, and time how long it takes to do five minutes of practice. Note the time when you start, and then use the stopwatch to time everything you consider to be part of practice. If your child starts telling you about their sore arm, their fun game at school, what they want for dinner, or what they want Santa to bring, listen to them but stop the stopwatch. Don’t tell them what you’re doing, and when you (finally) finish the practice that your teacher has set, ask them how long they think it took. Tell them how long it’s been since they started their practice (eg 20 minutes), and then tell them what the stopwatch says (eg 5 minutes). Often they are very different amounts of time! Challenge them to make the times more similar, and remind them when they are drifting off from their music work. Over the course of a few days your practice time and the time it takes to finish a practice should get much much closer.
If your child is under five, the problem is probably that they aren’t engaged enough with whatever it is that you’re doing. Stay positive, get excited (and get them excited) about whatever it is you are working on, and stay on one practice point at a time. Give yourself a lot of time to do a small amount of practice. I recommend a half hour window for around ten minutes of actual work.
Give them stickers as rewards if they focus on the work, even if it is only for a few minutes. Ask them to focus really well on something you want them to do, and then offer them the chance to decide what they want to do next. Make sure they are fed, watered and not too tired when you ask them to practise.
Also try some or all of the following:
- Get a basket of small toys (Lego, Sylvanians, building blocks, etc) and give your child an empty box. Each time they do something well, give them a toy. Over the course of a fifteen minute practice this might get them as many as thirty toys - don’t skimp! Tell them that after the practice they can play with as many toys as they earn, and you’ll put the rest away. If they are doing well but you have lots left, give them more than one each time.
- Start a rainbow system with your child (it will help to have a colour picture of a rainbow to hand - even a dodgy hand-drawn one will do - just make sure that green is in the middle of the rainbow). Use a small toy, placed to start on green, and move it up through the colours if they do well. If they are naughty, move it down through blue towards red and tell them they can work their way back towards green again. Warn them before moving them down, but just move them up every time you feel they deserve it. If you stay on violet for more than five minutes, end the practice and tell them they can try again tomorrow. Depending on how bad the behaviour that left them on violet was, you might want to consider the naughty step. If you’re not sure about what this is, google will bring up many explanations for you.
- Make sure they ‘shake their sillies out’ really often throughout the practice. Under fives cannot concentrate for very long, and they are not used to controlling their bodies in concentrated ways. Get them to shake after each element of practising, and give them the opportunity to be silly and playful. Ten star-jumps is a great way to get a tired child re-energised (and often hilarious to watch)
- Start a practice chart (see below for some examples) and award your child a coloured, silver or gold star according to how well each practice has gone. Offer them a treat when they get to a certain number of gold stars. If your child is finding it really hard to concentrate, you might decide that this should be three gold stars before a treat is forthcoming. If they are finding it a little easier, it might be ten or twenty gold stars before the treat is theirs. Make sure the treat is not one they will get anyway.
- Always tell your child that you know it’s hard to focus sometimes, and that you understand they will make mistakes (and so will you). Tell them you wish you had a magic wand that would make it all perfect, but sadly only hard work will do that for them. Be sure to praise them whenever they manage good concentration, even if only for a couple of minutes.
- Don’t lose your temper. This is the toughest part of all of it, but you are the adult and they are a child. Don’t let them provoke you into anger - if you feel it coming, just end the practice. Of course there are some occasions when anger is necessary, appropriate and useful. But there are lots of times when it is none of these things, and you need to assess which situation you’re in and act accordingly.
- Choose a book to read during practice. Make sure it doesn’t have too many words per page! After each activity your child has completed (for example making five bow-holds or finding the right position for the flute five times) put the instrument down, have a cuddle and read a page of the book. You can award extra pages for good focus, and if your child can read you can take turns reading a page each. It breaks a practice up very nicely and gives you some down time between each bit of work.
Ask your teacher for help if you need more than this!