In the lesson plans I include four or five songs for you to teach your child. Some of them aren’t actually singable, but are instead “finger-plays” – a type of chant, usually rhyming, and always using finger and hand motions. Twos and threes especially enjoy finger-plays – think of the “Ensy-Wensy Spider” if you’re still not sure what I’m talking about, although that one is set to music.

Any child can learn to sing! It is easier than learning to play violin or piano, and Dr. Suzuki’s method has shown the world thousands upon thousands of tiny children who have learned to play either instrument with sensitivity and beauty. Singing is as easy as talking – you just talk on pitch!

Here is a precious news cast about a seven year old girl who brings joy to the lives of others through her beautiful, God-given talent. ReverbNation places her at the top of the chart for Christian Gospel singers. She filmed a scene for a new movie due to be released next fall, “Machine Gun Preacher”, about a drug-dealer turned Christian, who dedicates the rest of his life to saving children in war-torn areas.

May you find your heart uplifted by this lovely little girl. I went straight to her website and ordered her CD for my mom!

May God bless you and your family,

Lorelei

Teaching Children to Have Beautiful Spirits

Suzuki did not want to raise a nation of musicians.  Teaching children to be concert violinists was never his goal.  Teaching them to have beautiful spirits was.  He lived through both world wars.  What a lot of ugliness he must have seen, and yet he was not embittered by it.   His father’s violin factory was bombed, and one brother was killed in the explosion.  But this modest, self-taught musician with only a high school diploma went on to change the world.  In 1991, a the age of 93, he was selected as one of the most influential people of the twentieth century.

The Mother Tongue Method Explained

What is the mother tongue method?  How does a baby learn to speak?  He is first loved.  He is surrounded by language and quiet acceptance.  His parents already love him – he does not have to earn that love by learning to speak.  His parents speak to him, as though he could already understand.  They surround him with words.  They sing to him, talk to him, read to him, and when he utters his first babbling sounds, they praise him profusely.  What parent isn’t proud to tell everyone at the office when his baby son first makes the sound “da-da”!

The baby is making sounds but not intelligible ones.  His parents continue love him and praise him, and model perfect language.  He says more nouns, and later a few verbs.  He even starts to form two-word sentences.  “Wan down!”  “Go bye-bye!”  The wise parent praises his toddler, but continues to model perfect speech.  The parent may repeat, “You want down.  Yes, son.  You want down,” as he reinforces and reteaches correct pronunciation.

By age five, most children have mastered the basics of language.  They speak in complex sentences, and are able to make their wants and wishes known.  They may learn a few more vocabulary words once they start school.  They may even learn to diagram a sentence, but most of what they have learned they learn from their parents, not the twelve years spent in formal education.

Music Instruction May Begin at Birth or Before

Parents are The Child's First, Best Teachers

When the child is a toddler, often around age 2, the mother then starts violin instruction, but brings her child to every lesson. This is important, for the mother must understand the basics of violin before she can help her child practice. As soon as the toddler shows an interest in imitating his mom, then he begins formal violin instruction. The Suzuki method continues to teach in the same manner as language acquisition, though. The child listens to a recording of the short musical selection he is to learn – as much as ten thousand times! The child learns how it is supposed to sound, and learns to correct himself. Because Suzuki students concentrate so much on building listening skills, they often perform very well in all areas of study in school.

Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Suzuki Teacher and Her Student

There are many books, blogs, and websites available to help Suzuki parents. There are charts for daily practice,  motivational techniques, and more. Then communities with larger Suzuki programs may also have group lessons and theory classes for their little students. The group lessons are a blast, and often all the motivation that young students need. However, I had four children enrolled in a great Suzuki program, so I basically had twelve half-hour classes a week! It wasn’t far to the church where the program rented space, but it was too far to walk. When two of my four decided they didn’t really want to continue, I didn’t try very hard to change their minds.

None of my children majored in music when they went to college. But they are all musical. They sing in church choirs. They sing when they do their chores or take a shower. My son took his violin with him to Korea when he was stationed there. My oldest daughter plays her violin for her daughter now. And I think that my children do have beautiful spirits. They care about deeply about each other, often calling each other more frequently than they call me! They care about their friends and neighbors. They are considerate, polite, responsible, resourceful young adults. I’m so proud of them.

I can’t guarantee that if your child studies the violin he will be a kind, responsible adult. No program of instruction can do that. But I do believe that the time a parent spends actively involved with his child can make a world of difference.  So whether it be in music, baseball, camping, biking or stamp collecting – whatever is your passion, share it with your child.

Related Reading:
Amazing Grace
Three Year Old Music Conductor
J4 – Musical Family Wins Face Off Contest

Photo Credits:
Top: photo by Mark Rain
Middle: photo by Paul Byrley
Bottom: photo by Lee Farmer

When children play, they are learning.  As they play with Legos, Tinker Toys, puzzles, string beads, or manipulate other small objects, they are developing fine motor control.  When they run, jump, climb, skip, crawl and tumble, they are developing large muscle control.  As they play games of make-believe they develop their imagination.  They improve their language skills, cooperation and conflict resolution skills. Cutting with scissors isn’t just wasting paper, it is encouraging creativity.  Finger painting is a better method of self-expression than playing with one’s food.  When children sing, they develop auditory skills.  When they dance, they develop balance.  When young children do just about anything, they learn from it.  They are making sense of their world as they interact with their environment.

Children Imitate Their Parents, so One Day They Will Know How To Be Parents

Basic toys include wood blocks, dolls and doll clothes, tricycles, roller skates, jump ropes, dress-ups, books (plain old library books are great, not read-to-me-Elmo, read-to-me-Barney or read-to-me-Sponge Bob) Legos or Duplos, puzzles, play dough (commercial or home-made) child-sized dishes and toy kitchen sets, wooden trains, cars, trucks, sand pail and shovel, rubber balls, and lots and lots of art supplies.

When your child has these toys and the time to play with them, you child has everything she needs to learn and develop cognitively, physically, socially and emotionally.  That just might be the best gift a parent can give her child!

Photo Credits:
Top:http://www.flickr.com/photos/cookylida/ / CC BY 2.0
Bottom:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiarescott/ / CC BY 2.0

Isn’t that sweet? We also happened to be working on the school play at the time. I was Viola in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, while Alan worked on the stage crew. And we had a mutual friend. His cousin Cathy Tomczak helped to push us together. We were polar opposites in many respects. He grew up on a dairy farm. I grew up in the city. I was the high school dropout. He’d loved school. He hadn’t missed a single day until his senior year when he got chicken pox. He was the all-star athlete in football, baseball, basketball and golf, (remember how I did in phy ed?) and he was Prom King. I didn’t even go to my prom.

But in other ways, we were meant for each other. We both wanted to be married, to have children, to have a solid home life. We were more interested in finding job satisfaction than financial freedom. We were both raised in church-going families, although he was Catholic and I was Methodist. We both loved to read, and often would read the same book. And we were both feeling a little too old for college.

I was only twenty-one then, but I had taken almost two years off from college. I had worked at dozens of part time jobs, and traveled some. I’d been to Arizona and Maine (by car) and even dipped into Canada for a day. He had been in the Air Force for four years. He’d lived in Greece and flown in airplanes. We were both treated like “old folks” by our college peers.

So, the upshot is that by the fall of his sophomore year (my first senior year) we were married and expecting our firstborn.

Now, one of the questions his Catholic relatives kept asking me at our wedding was, “how many children do you want to have?” It seemed tasteless to me, as they must have suspected baby #1 was on the way. And as good Catholics, was that even a choice available to us? Didn’t we have to take however many children God saw fit to send our way? So I did a typical “me” thing, and gave a flippant answer. “Twelve.”

We were married in 1980. Tammy was born in 1981, and Daniel in 1982, and then his relatives started to believe me! His aunts patted me on the shoulder and told me what a good Catholic I was. (I had converted the year before). My protestant relatives scolded me, and tried to tell me about birth control. But I loved being pregnant. I loved having kids, even though we weren’t financially ready for them. We had planned to wait until Alan graduated before starting a family. So much for plans. I think I would have welcomed those twelve kids, if God had given them to me.

I had a difficult time carrying my babies. With Tammy I had toxemia. With Daniel, I was under a lot of stress – my second senior year, I did my student teaching at four different schools, I worked part time, I still carried eighteen credits per semester, and I also had cooking, cleaning, dishes, and diapers to deal with. On May 4th, 1982, Daniel was born. On May 15th I graduated from college. On May 20th we packed up and moved to upper Michigan where Alan would finish his degree. And by May 30th Alan had returned to Wisconsin to work on his dad’s farm for the summer, as he needed the income and his dad needed the help. I stayed behind, because I wasn’t sure how it would work to have me living in his parents’ house for three months with two small children, and I was trying to get my first licensed Day Care Home up and running, which was how I planned to support us while Alan went to school.

So there I was, in a new home in a new state, I didn’t know anybody, and my body started to fall apart. I had been under too much stress for too long. My mom came up to visit me (I think she was worrying again) and in the end, I went back home with her for an extended visit, or more aptly, a recuperation. I don’t remember much of that visit, only that I passed the baby to her and I went to sleep. About two weeks later, I came back to life.

I returned to Dodgeville, Michigan and did manage to get my day care home licensed and all the openings filled before the school year began. There was a popular preschool in town, but no one would take children under three. At the time I was licensed for six children, regardless of age. So, you guessed it. I had six babies! Tammy was the oldest at eighteen months. I had a little girl about her age named Kristina, and a part-time girl named LeeAnn, and a boy named Jonathan, and a fulltime infant just two weeks old named Leeanne, and my son Daniel was two months old. I eventually had two more part time children as well.

Life became organized chaos. I took great pride in my work. I found a small table for the children at a yard sale. I found six little chairs for the table at a school auction. I gathered supplies – tempra paint, crayons, paper, glue, paste, safety scissors, toys, balls, even a little slide. I had a stroller, a baby backpack, a “Johnny Jump-up” (I hate those things now!) several baby swings, a changing table stocked with six different piles of diapers (I used cloth, some of the day care kids used paper), one high chair, and so much more that there was barely room in our two-bedroom, two-story home for Alan and me.
I used to take all six of them for walks every day. There wasn’t much to walk to in Dodgeville back then. (I haven’t been back, has it changed?) I could put the tiny infant in the baby carrier, Danny in a stroller, and the other four in a big red wagon, and we’d walk up to the post office and back. Sometimes I would cart half the toys out onto the yard so they could play outside. I prepared well-balanced menus, and careful lesson plans. I began teaching Tammy to read, and she would try to teach it little Jonathan. It was so cute- I took pictures.

The first day care child came at six o’clock in the morning. The last one left at six p.m. Some nights I began to wish that they would take my two children with them when they left. I loved my work, but I never got a day off. And we weren’t making enough money to support us, so Alan took on an afterschool job. He went to classes from 8 to 5, then went to the meat market until midnight. If I wanted to see him at all, I had to wait up for him. And at midnight, he had to do his homework before class the next day.

Things were tough. Sometimes I don’t know how we survived! Except that I knew I loved Alan, and that all my problems would leave as soon as he graduated. And Alan has that special tunnel vision that most guys are born with. All he could see was the goal at the end of the tunnel. I don’t think he even knew there was a tunnel there.

I learned how to scrimp. I got food stamps, and government commodities. This was before internet, but I scrounged libraries, cookbooks and old people with knowledge for ways to save money. I sewed for the children; I bought stuff at yard sales. We never went out to eat, out to the movies, or out anywhere. And I continued to learn about young children, so I would be the best possible day care provider I could be.

At the time, I remember thinking I was nuts. But I also remember thinking, “These are precious moments. I don’t want to miss them.” Children grow up so fast! That is such an over-used phrase that it boarders on triteness, and yet, it’s still true. If you blink, you might miss something that will never be repeated. Like the first time your daughter learns to tie her shoe, after struggling with it for weeks. Or the day your son stands up and walks clear across the floor for the first time. Or the day they flush a box of Mr. Bubble down the toilet and break the toilet, and the plumber comes back for the umpteenth time, laughing as he says he doesn’t know how a box of Mr. Bubble could break the toilet, only to find a pair of Sunday shoes stuck in the pipes as well.

Or the day you sleepily roll over in bed to snuggle with your spouse you seldom see, and hear your two year old tell your one year old, “Danny, I need more paint.” And you spring out of bed, to see they had gotten out paint, brushes, water, but no paper. In a semi-conscious state of shock you yell at them, “Go wash up in the bathroom!” as you stare at the blue paint on the dining table, chairs, and floor. Blue paint on their pajamas, hands, and faces. Blue paint on the counters, walls, and windows. And as their footy sleeper pajamas are leaving blue foot prints down the hallway, and blue handprints appear on the door knob, the sink, the faucet and towels, your fuzzy mind allows you to scold, “And go back to bed!” Now blue paint also adorns their bedroom door, their quilts, sheets, and favorite blankies.

Yes, these are indeed precious moments.