Arioso Music Academy

"How much should they be practicing?" Without fail, I get asked this question by parents of new students in private lessons EVERY SINGLE TIME! For this question I honestly have no clear, straight answer. My answer for them is typically always "that depends". I'm not the type of teacher that "requires" my students to practice for X many days or X many hours. I know I know, all the music teachers reading this will most likely criticize me for this but I seriously swear by this method and when explaining it to parents I try to put it into a different perspective. Think about it. What generally happens when children (or adults, I'm guilty of this too!) feel like they HAVE to do something? They no longer want to do it. For example, if you tell your child they HAVE to clean their room, you will usually be faced with complaints, whines, and sometimes tears. But if you make it fun, play some music while you clean, turn organization into a ...

When teaching private music lessons one of the hardest things to do is trying to squeeze in a lot of information into a 30 minute time window. As teachers we love to see our students succeed and achieve as much as possible! So how do you make sure they are getting the most of their 30 minutes with you? Of course the luxury of private lessons is that each lesson is unique and catered directly to the individual students needs but you still need to have a basic structure to how the lesson must go to ensure they receive an effective lesson that makes them want to continue coming back for more. I will go more in depth with future posts regarding intermediate - advanced lessons but for this post I am providing 5 tips for your very first beginner lessons with young students in any instrument. 1. Get to know your student!  This is arguably the most important part of your first lesson. Especially with young children most often they are only attending the lessons because their parents ...