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TRY A MUSIC PARTY!
Having been a Suzuki parent for just over one year now, thinking about how to keep my child motivated and enthusiastic about practising is a constant challenge. I have – as all experienced parents do! – discovered that the key is ensuring that it stay fun. So I thought that other parents might be interested in hearing about the Music Party that I organized for one of the afternoon’s during the recent school strike.
The basic model for our Music Party was that perennial favourite – the birthday party. Or, in other words: kids, party games, party food + cake. Really getting into the spirit of things, I even blew up some balloons…but that was strictly icing on the cake! At any rate, we invited a number of other children from my son’s group class to come to a party, from 2:00 to 4:00, and to bring their violins. When the kids arrived, they played party games – that is, regular birthday party games, but with a musical twist. After the games, they sat down to pizza, juice and cake. Unlike regular birthday parties, what was great about running a Music Party was that I could ask the other parents to stay, and even to bring ideas for games. This meant that when I needed to get the food ready, I could ask one of the other parents to continue keeping the games going – so it was a far less work than running a birthday party!
Here are some of the games that we tried…and ideas that we didn’t get around to trying out last time, but that are on the agenda for my next party.
- Cooperative musical chairs: One child is the ‘leader’ and plays his or her instrument while the others walk around the chairs. Each time the leader stop playing, a chair is removed, and all of the kids pile onto the remaining chairs. When there are no chairs left, it is the turn of another child to be the leader.
- Musical obstacle course: the children are given some sort of circular obstacle course (crawl through a tunnel, hop the length of the room, crawl on their hands and knees, etc.) to complete. At the completion of each stage, they have to do some sort of exercise on their instrument (e.g., play 5 Mississippi Hot Dogs). [This requires that parents be actively involved, carrying the instrument from one station to the next.]
- Musical Simon Says: let the kids take turns being Simon. With their instruments, have them play Simon says. Simon might hold the instrument in a goofy way (although one may have to be careful here), or may play part of a piece that all the children know (even just Ice Cream Cone on open strings).
- Fishing trip: [This is easiest if, like one of the parents who came to our party, you have a fishing game toy.] Each child in turn is given a fishing rod and gets to try and catch a fish. On each fish is written the name of a piece that they are working on. When they have caught the fish, they first play that piece as a solo, and then all the children play it together.
- Pin the bow on the violin (or the hands on the piano…): like Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but appropriately re-jigged.
Vicky Barham