I'm constantly looking for and playing kids games to see if I should recommend them or not. There are serious music teaching apps for the older students, but for this post we will try to keep it strictly fun. Here are some of the best music game apps I have personally found (quite frankly...any app by JoyTunes is amazing!):
I will start will all the JoyTunes apps, because well...they're amazing and fun!
1. Simply Piano (JoyTunes): This app is really fun to learn, it plays background music that accompanies you while you learn/repeat simple notes. It might be difficult for super young students as it doesn't really explain what rests are...but it's in the format of "guitar hero" basically...so they can catch on.
2. Piano Maestro (JoyTunes): Pretty much like Simply Piano, but allows me to track what they do in the game. It's pretty neat for me to see their progress. If you're interested and you're a part of my studio, just let me know and I'll send you the link to sign up under my teacher account.
3. Piano Dust Buster (JoyTunes): LOVE! Super, super fun for kids to have fun with music. (Of course, it ignores technique and proper finger numbers on certain keys...but if it gets them loving piano and/or music....DO IT!)
4. Piano Summer Games (JoyTunes)- Play National Anthems: More piano song teaching games.
5. Tap and sing by StoryBots (JibJab Media Inc): This is just super cute. It teaches more general music skills, but is still super helpful. You can change from the note names to solfege. Kids love this one! It's super entertaining. (They also have a Christmas version.)
6. Easy Music (Edoki Academy): This app is really not for learning necessarily, although that can happen. It's more of a musical exploration. Really interesting though!
7. Music for little Mozarts (Alfred Music Publishing): This app is a little outdated, but still does it's job and could still be fun.
8. Rhythm Cat Lite HD- Learn to Read Music (LMuse Limited): This one is awesome and entertaining. Games to teach rhythm.
9. NoteWorks Free (Azati Corporation): Super fun note learning game
10. Kids Music Factory Free (GiggleUp Kids Apps And Education): More for 3-5 year olds. But super cute, and they will laugh as they compose their own songs... it's pretty awesome.
These are all free apps, with in-app purchases available but not necessary at all. Give your musical children an app as a prize for practicing Suzuki stuff and see what fun they have. Please let me know which ones work the best!!
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Perfectionism Continued
When I was in school for Music Education, my professor in my "Social Context & Politics in Education" made us follow this education blog called "Mindshift". I typically delete them, as I have a lot on my plate and sift through the ones I would actually like to read....one of those popped into my inbox this morning and goes perfectly along with our topic of perfectionism/how we deal with failure. I highly suggest reading it, as it talks about what a parent can do to encourage a growth mindset, rather than the negative perfectionism. "Growth Mindset" is becoming a huge trend in education, and boy does that make an ADHD graduate of high school and college smile! I didn't learn this skill until my Junior Year of college at 27 and yet, I still didn't really get a hold of it until this year at 29! If we can get little kids to stop beating themselves up, and stop learning confidence via perfectionism, but rather a growth mindset...wow...what a blessing in their lives and they won't even realize how much emotional pain, self-doubt, failures, self-loathing, and insecurities they will have thrown away and their confidence towards learning and mastering ANYTHING they want to, will become powerful! They will train success to bend to their will, not the other way around.
There are two common analogies teachers often use to encourage a growth mindset over perfectionism...the first one involves Thomas Edison and his trial and error period of attempting to make a lightbulb. It took him roughly 10,000 tries to finally get it right..,but look at what all his failures brought to the future! He would not have succeeded if he let his failures dictate his motivation.
The second analogy is of course, Albert Einstein. He failed math in school, and YET, refused to let that failure dictate his future and changed mathematics drastically!!
We all struggle greatly with our egos. Our egos and perfectionism, are not always a bad thing. They can motivate us to better ourselves short-term when we need a little extra push. But if you use them as tools for success for too long...you're bound to get stuck somewhere along the line and those attributes can no longer help you. You have two choices at that point. You can either say "Well...I gave it my best effort and it's just not my cup of tea..." Or you can use your growth mindset to really figure out and analyze where your weaknesses lie, which involves putting your ego away for the time being and target those areas for improvement! Wow! What a powerful lesson to learn at a young age! I am currently 29 and just now starting to really shift towards this mindset. Perhaps if I had understood this in my teen years, I would not have gone down the dark path I did and wasted so much precious time in my life. But you know what, without those years of failing, I guess I probably wouldn't appreciate my hard work towards success as much, as it did not come so easily to me in my own perfectionist mentality. Cheers to many more years of growth!
Here's the link to the article "Talking About Failure: What Parents Can Do to Motivate Your Kids in School", if you would like to read it:
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/05/08/talking-about-failure-what-parents-can-do-to-motivate-kids-in-school/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29
Saturday, May 7, 2016
May Topic of the Month: Perfectionism
On my theme for the month of battling perfectionism, I showed the kids this quick youtube clip from the Disney film "Meet the Robinson's". As Walt Disney said himself, "Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious... and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths".
They loved being able to watch a cartoon clip in their lesson, and we discussed it afterwards. They may not understand it fully yet, but I'm going to keep brainstorming to find different ways of approaching the topic.
How can I get the students to not make a big deal of their mess-ups and continue going in the music, without starting all the way over? Any ideas? I'd love to hear them!
They loved being able to watch a cartoon clip in their lesson, and we discussed it afterwards. They may not understand it fully yet, but I'm going to keep brainstorming to find different ways of approaching the topic.
How can I get the students to not make a big deal of their mess-ups and continue going in the music, without starting all the way over? Any ideas? I'd love to hear them!
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Perfectionism
There is a perfectionist in all of us. In some it is stronger than others. Personally, I have previously been such a perfectionist that if I don't make an assignment awesome, I don't turn it in at all. I'd rather take the loss in points, over turning in something that does not show my best work. In high school, I didn't care. In college, I had to. Perfectionism, wasn't an option in college, when you're a 25-29 year old music major, with an almost full-time job outside of school that helps to pay your living expenses, while studying. For the first time in my life, I had people that would rather have my crap work on time, than my best work late. The first time I failed a college class in a degree I actually cared about, I was devastated!! I was struggling so hard to prove to myself that I could do it, and to have to admit defeat, was so humbling.
The reality college taught me, was that if you want to be perfect at everything, you're going to develop an ulcer, or worse, die of a heart attack. Your body is what keeps you alive...in order to return the favor, you must give it a break sometimes. The reality of perfectionism, is that it leads to procrastination, poor self-image, giving up, and eventually the motivation it supplies at first, turns to discouragement rather quickly. So how do we defeat this enemy of our own minds? That is the question I have been asking myself for a long time, and one that came up in lessons last week. It motivated me to figure out how to veer away from that mindset, which is SO incredibly crushing in the music performance world. It seems small, when you make a mistake for the fifth time and curse. But what that turns into, is performing on a stage in front of strangers, seizing up from fear of making mistakes, and then becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sucks the joy out of music and puts the stress activators on HIGH! You walk off the stage, obsessing over your tiny mistakes and how you could have done it better. This leads to a self-punishment that can sometimes be severe. It can also lead to you giving up, instead of fighting through the brick wall you've hit, and eventually, at some point, far or near, breaking the wall down and moving forward!!
I begin researching how to teach children that failure is normal and prevalent in music study. If you can't get over that, you won't be taking lessons very long. Lots of sources said things like "Tell the student it's okay to fail!" But one source really caught my attention. It said something that hit home in my discovery of how to further deepen the relationship with my own boyfriend....validation. Don't avoid their perfectionism by trying to deny them and their feelings. Their feelings are very real and upsetting! If you validate these feelings (this does not mean giving in or encouraging perfectionism), you allow them to feel that way. Only then can you show them different ways of thinking about failure. Super interesting! I'm going to make 'perfectionism' a theme in my studio for the month of May.
The reality college taught me, was that if you want to be perfect at everything, you're going to develop an ulcer, or worse, die of a heart attack. Your body is what keeps you alive...in order to return the favor, you must give it a break sometimes. The reality of perfectionism, is that it leads to procrastination, poor self-image, giving up, and eventually the motivation it supplies at first, turns to discouragement rather quickly. So how do we defeat this enemy of our own minds? That is the question I have been asking myself for a long time, and one that came up in lessons last week. It motivated me to figure out how to veer away from that mindset, which is SO incredibly crushing in the music performance world. It seems small, when you make a mistake for the fifth time and curse. But what that turns into, is performing on a stage in front of strangers, seizing up from fear of making mistakes, and then becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sucks the joy out of music and puts the stress activators on HIGH! You walk off the stage, obsessing over your tiny mistakes and how you could have done it better. This leads to a self-punishment that can sometimes be severe. It can also lead to you giving up, instead of fighting through the brick wall you've hit, and eventually, at some point, far or near, breaking the wall down and moving forward!!
I begin researching how to teach children that failure is normal and prevalent in music study. If you can't get over that, you won't be taking lessons very long. Lots of sources said things like "Tell the student it's okay to fail!" But one source really caught my attention. It said something that hit home in my discovery of how to further deepen the relationship with my own boyfriend....validation. Don't avoid their perfectionism by trying to deny them and their feelings. Their feelings are very real and upsetting! If you validate these feelings (this does not mean giving in or encouraging perfectionism), you allow them to feel that way. Only then can you show them different ways of thinking about failure. Super interesting! I'm going to make 'perfectionism' a theme in my studio for the month of May.
Welcome
Hello,
Everyone has a blog now a days... blog this, blog that. Well, I have found time and time again, that blogging really helps music studios communicate and gives an extra sense of connection. I don't have a lot of time on my hands, so I will try my best to be consistent at updating this, at least once a week. Feel free to leave comments!! Thank you.
-Ms. Leilah
Everyone has a blog now a days... blog this, blog that. Well, I have found time and time again, that blogging really helps music studios communicate and gives an extra sense of connection. I don't have a lot of time on my hands, so I will try my best to be consistent at updating this, at least once a week. Feel free to leave comments!! Thank you.
-Ms. Leilah
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