... on listening!
Listening - I am a firm optimist. I believe it when someone says that if you follow a recipe you will get the expected result. When I first learned that listening to the music made an enormous difference in how a child learned to play the piano, I was willing to give it a try. We listened to our Suzuki piano music daily and sure enough she learned to play the first songs very easily. The melody was the first thing she imitated, but that was quickly followed with the "dynamics." The most impressive aspect of this for me, that has reinforced my commitment to daily listening to the music, occurred after a summer of traveling. We traveled for six weeks and my daughter did not practice at all during that time, as we were camping in national parks all over the West. I was nervous coming back to lessons - I worried, "How much did she forget?" But, sure enough, our almost-daily listening kept those tunes in her head and it was short work to get her fingers accurately back on those keys. Now her songs are much longer, but that regular listening makes learning so much easier. She can break down and hear in her head exactly what the song is supposed to sound like. It is like reminding her of something she already knows, much like increasing your child's writing and spelling abilities by exposing her to rich vocabulary in excellent stories. Listening and doing seem to go hand in hand.
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