Sounds Like Me in Houston, T - Sounds Like Me by Elisabeth Swim

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How to Slow Down

3/18/2018

The next time you find yourself in a state of stress or anxiety while talking with a loved one, try extending your “out” breaths, your exhalations.

With every sentence you speak, see how many words you can speak before you take your next breath. You may even play with slowing down your speech.

Read out loud, breathing at the commas:

The rain,
in Spain,
stays mainly,
in the plain.*

Now read this version of the sentence out loud, breathing at the commas

The rain in Spain,
stays mainly in the plain.

And, finally, breathe out, breathe in, and read:

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

How did each version feel? What did you sense as you slowed down with longer breaths out, or exhalations?

*from My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe

Bring Your Own Rhythm

3/18/2018

Make time regularly for a family jam session where you either play along with your favorite songs or make up your own. Any musical instrument can build skills that translate to success at the piano. Rhythm instruments are wonderful and you can even make your own … my favorite trick is to fill old supplement bottles with beans or rice to use as shakers. You can paint them or cover them with collage for extra fun!

Photo by Matthieu A on Unsplash

In your at-home jam band, everyone gets an instrument. Rotate instruments as needed for a sense of fairness. Start by taking turns leading the circle, by playing their name. (for example, I would play E-LIS-a-beth with four beats).

Do your best to avoid correcting the kids: simply follow their lead, especially while they are leading. Make sure they can hear your voice over your jam band sound for the next part: As a group, play fast, slow, medium, loud and soft. The main goal is to have fun … and if when you talk about the sounds you hear, try to use active listening (see the Listen Up! chapter in Piano Without Tears).

It’s fine to ask everyone afterward what their favorite part was, just try to use neutral language when talking about the music you make, in general. “We made loud sounds, quiet sounds, fast sounds, slow sounds … all kinds of sounds!”

How Long Can I Learn?

3/18/2018

One of the most important ways to respect your brain is to work within its optimal learning time frame. In my brain-friendly music lessons, I encourage my students to work within a time frame that’s appropriate for their body-mind system.

There is a simple formula to estimate this at any given moment.

The brain has optimal lengths of time for learning that increase with age. A good target to aim is your child’s age plus two. A child who is developmentally seven years old can practice, do a worksheet or any other task … for up to nine minutes optimally without a break. After that they may continue to work but mistakes will increase, a sign that the system needs a break or change of pace. This is, of course, provided the child’s basic needs are met and they are not hungry, over tired, etc …

The optimum attention span for adults maxes out at 20 minutes so if you notice yourself getting antsy in traffic or long meetings, you may now understand why.

Get Your Kids to Play Music

3/18/2018

No matter how responsible your young ones are, they are still children, and they need support of the adults in their lives to help them build the new habit of home play. Your active interest and celebration of their efforts are invaluable to support them in this new and grown-up habit.

There are two things that you, as a parent, can do to increase the likelihood that your child will play on their own in between lessons. It’s simple, can be very brief, and requires no musical training on your part.

I. Show Active Interest, Without Judgement: Ask them about their lessons and what they are learning. Do your best to check in at least once during the week outside of lessons. About the sounds (or pieces, for older kids) they make and whether they are:

Slow, fast, medium speed? A combination?
High-pitched, low, medium? A combination?
Finally, ask:
What is most fun?

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

II. Celebrate Effort: Praise your child's focus, effort and patience with themselves after you hear them complete a lesson or home play. Tell them, if you like, what you noticed about the sounds they played (from the ideas above). Time permitting, ask them to show you what they are working on, and show interest as they do so. Even if when they explain or show something to you, it’s obviously still new for them, avoid correcting them. You can share any bits of information like this with your teacher so she can use them in lessons to support your child’s understanding.

No one in the world can give your child attention the way you and your co-parent can. Because of your unique relationship, even a small gesture of positive interest from you will amplify their will to work at something!

Mistakes Help

3/18/2018

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

My students reveal their brilliance to me through what they call mistakes. They tell me which part of a student’s mind-body system has mastered a skill and which part is still learning it. As a teacher, I need my students’ mistakes in order to do my job well.

Learning naturally, in a way that is brain-friendly, should be like any other spontaneous human activity we do: There is a time to begin, a time to end, and a time to change pace or switch gears.

No matter what my capacity for empathy may be, I am still a separate person from my students … I don’t get to feel what it is like to think their thoughts or be them.

This is why I need mistakes, cues that a student has gotten their maximum benefit for the time being, and that is time to switch gears.

Mistakes point out to me the gaps in learning that it is my job as a teacher to fill.

The mind-body system needs to repeat a skill thousands of times in order to master it. A common misconception is that if someone has learned how to do something in one situation, they should be able to apply this skill in all other settings or contexts.

Because people have different learning styles, they may take to something presented in one way, but it might take time for them to master it in other situations.

A mistake could tell me to present a concept in a different way, to work with a different part of my student’s personality, or to guide the lesson to a different task–to take a brain break.

When a student makes a mistake in a session, I celebrate their courage to take a risk doing something that is not yet easy for them and knowing they might make a mistake. I do my best to model positivity and strong esteem for my students. We look at their mistakes as valuable information, rather than as matters of guilt or shame.

Play Now, Practice Later

3/17/2018

I tell my students to never practice the piano, but to always play the piano. When you think it’s fun, you do it more often.

Joe Raciti, pianist and music teacher

Children want to do what trusted adults ask of them. But asking for something before they are ready to trust me dooms the whole idea of home play (practicing) from the start.

Instead, I build trust during the first few lessons with healthy amounts of play, in the form of copying games, rhythm clapping and shared creativity. After a good amount of time building trust in this way, a child is much better prepared internally to follow directions from me when I am not there. Still, I avoid using the word practice in my requests as much as possible, at the beginning.

Enough of my students’ parents have their own childhood memories of word practice being used in unkind ways that I stay away from it altogether in the early years of lessons.
This helps my students and their parents develop an understanding of home play as the discovery of music and learning that happens in between lessons. Calling it home play frames it as a choice my students make, rather than a chore.

If students don't do their home play, they still enjoy their lessons. But they do feel excited and motivated when they have done it, because they can see and sense their own progress.

After a few years of study, I do suggest calling home play practicing, but only after a student has gotten into the habit of consistently enjoying playing the piano on their own in between sessions.

For now, though, the focus is on home play. If you, dear reader, have any habits or skills in your life that you need to practice, give the term home play a spin and see if it gives the thought of it more energy. Let me know what you find out!

Music is Math You Can Feel

3/15/2018

Music is rhythm. Language is rhythm. Play is rhythm. When we improve rhythm, we make other areas of life easier and more enjoyable.

To teach the most fundamental part of music to yourself, or your kids, find the beat, what we in music call the down beat or the one.

This is the first beat in the rhythmic cycle of a piece or song. Most songs on the radio are in a 4-beat cycle, and so is The Alphabet Song. When you clap along and count, on the down beat, or first beat of each cycle, it will go something like this:

A B C D
One Two Three Four
(CLAP)

E F   G ----
One Two   Three Four
(CLAP)

H I   J K
One Two   Three Four
(CLAP)

L M N O P ----
One Two   Three Four
(CLAP)

This song has four beats in its rhythmic cycle. There are songs with two beats, three beats, six beats, eight beats and even five and seven beats.

Find the Beat is a fun game to play on your own or with your family. While listening to music, try to hear the strongest pulse in the beat. You will notice that it repeats itself regularly. Then count one out loud when you hear that beat. You may tap or clap with your one. Notice how fast the other beats go by in between pulses. Begin to count along with those. Eventually you will find yourself counting to the same number over and over again before you get back to one. That’s the beat … you have found it!

Excerpted from the Amazon exclusive:

I created the song Add it Up to help you find the beat! Click on the button below and then scroll down to the media box for the song Add it Up. The beat changes throughout the song: Can you still find it?

Listen to Add it Up

Sit Still ≠ Pay Attention

3/15/2018

Can you think of a time when you were in a long meeting, or sitting in traffic? How long did it take before you started fidgeting? Was it a relief at the end to be able to stand up and move around?

In a culture of productivity, speed is at a premium. Many well-meaning grownups believe the myth that if a child sits still they will learn faster.

This is simply not true!

Children learn fastest by moving because the brain develops through movement! For more on this, please see Smart Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head (Carla Hanneford, 2005).

Many, if not most, children absorb more information while they are moving than while they are forcing their bodies to be still. Stillness takes a lot of energy, especially after a child has already spent a full day in school, as most do before the most common piano lesson times.

Fortunately, I have a professional background in brain-friendly movement, which I use for mini breaks in my piano lessons. The piano keyboard and written music can both be visually overwhelming and can make students feel tired after long periods of focus. With gentle, brain-friendly movement breaks, my students are able to maximize our time together at the piano, and feel good about themselves while learning.

Another way I keep students engaged is to give them brief standing breaks during lessons, sometimes playing musical copycat or note search games all over the piano keyboard.

For more on brain-friendly movement and my gentle approach to accelerated learning, click below to read my first book. Or check out the Brain Highways video channel.

Generous Attention

Piano is Simpler than I Thought!

3/15/2018

Though I started playing piano at age six, it took me almost two decades to befriend it for good. The piano is big, and its music has its own language of symbols, I was somewhat afraid of it even after having played it for many years.

As I describe in my short book Piano without Tears, I discovered a simple formula in graduate school that helped me release my fear of the piano, for good.

As long as I could count to twelve, I could get the piano.

The piano has 88 keys (notes) in all. That's a lot of notes. But these can be seen in a simple pattern of 12 notes:

5 black keys + 7 white keys = only 12 different keys!

There are five black keys on any keyboard. Take a look at the picture above. Notice that the black keys come in groups of three black keys and groups of two black keys. They appear in an alternating pattern: a group of two / a group of three / a group of two / a group of three, etc ... (The lone black key on the far left side is a solo member of an unfinished group of three).

There are seven white keys. They are organized according to their position among the black keys. Notice that there are four white keys directly touching the three black keys. There are also three white keys directly touching the two black keys.

So you see, all piano notes are organized in a pattern which has, in all, twelve notes with distinct shapes and positions that help us tell them apart.

It took me more than twenty years to see the simple pattern that is the basis for the piano layout. But I help my students understand this simple formula right away. To find out more about my eight-week Befriend the Piano series, click below to give me a call.

Both Hands, Now!

2/27/2018

Which hand do you use to write? Is that the same hand you use to open jars and to point at your screen? How about your other hand? What is it doing right now?

People who play the piano have strong and independent connections from both hands to the brain. This means many pianists find it easy to do two totally different things with their hands at the same time!

If you want some extra mind-body power to draw on every day, start by simply noticing each hand throughout the day:

Slowly stretch each hand and then curl it into a fist. Do this one hand at a time. Name what happens: my right hand is opening, now closing, and so on.
Throughout your day, notice what each hand is doing. Sense texture, pressure and movement. Name it, if you like.
Whenever possible, invite your learning hand (non-dominant) to take over for your strong hand, just for fun. You may be surprised at what you discover!

Let me know what you discover! Send me a note or post a comment on my FB page here.

Photo by José González on Unsplash