Next term DS will become a full chorister which means he will be in the Abbey four days per week rather than two and he will get home at 7pm - he goes to bed at 8pm.

It is also cricket season so he will be in Wednesday matches which finish after 5pm and if he is at an away match then he may not get home until 6:30/7pm. He is at school on Saturday and and he will be in matches all afternoon. Once he hits Y6 he will also have a jump in the amount of homework. I feel sorry for him just writing this.

I need advice on the best way to utilise his practices. I sit in on them as this tends to speed them up and here is what we currently do four times a week:

Bassoon: all G4 scales once but not arpeggios/chromatics/dominants yet, all pieces once 30-40 mins
Double bass: G2 scales and pieces once - 10-15 mins
Piano: G1 scales and pieces once - 10-15 mins

Firstly, is his bedtime too early (Y5, age 10)? He needs to be up by 6:50am each morning and by going to bed at this time he normally wakes up naturally between 6:30-6:40am so I feel that he must need an early bed or he would be getting up earlier.

Assuming his bedtime remains the same, this leaves us with 30 minutes during the week with more time on Saturday and Sunday. What should I prioritise (he is sitting exams in all next term) and how can I make the practice sessions as effective as possible? There will be no opportunity to practice during the day or first thing in the morning. I feel my poor lad deserves some down time and I have tried to persuade him to give up double bass but he refuses.

I thought he wasn't taking anymore Bassoon exams

Perhaps he should ease off one of his instruments or stay as a part time chorister.

Three exams in one session for a year 5 is too much.

I don't know what to suggest other than to set the alarm clock for 6.30am and do the piano then to at least get that out of the way without interrupting his sleep pattern.

I don't know anything about choristers - is it only up to a certain age?

He is not allowed to be a part time chorister. Everything I have written about his timetable is set in stone so these are the hours we are working with. He wants to do the exams, not me at all, but it doesn't matter if he was sitting exams or not he would still need to practice.

Choristers finish in Y8. Can he get effective practice done at 6:30am? He doesn't have breakfast until he gets to school at 7:30am and we wouldn't fit in breakfast at home as we are on a tight schedule to get up and out.

re: bedtime, I do not have children but I do remember very clearly being 10 and having to stay up late for language lessons twice a week (resulting in bedtime going from 8pm to 10pm) and being very very tired the next day at school. I used to get up at 6 then. Hope it's not too bizarre that I'm adding this, but it is still quite a vivid memory for me of being tired at school.

3 exams in 1 session for a year 5 is too much. We've only ever done 2 exams in 1 session for daughter, and I think 1 of my pupils did 2 exams in 1 session, and they didn't enjoy it.

I teach a year 6 who has a busy schedule at home and she is permanently tired, even on a Monday lunchtime when I'd think she should be full of energy. So be wary of making his bedtime later if he's coping well now with the amount of sleep that he has.

Could you consider piano and double bass practices on alternate days so that it shaves a few minutes off practice time? If his timetable is going to get heavier next year, that may be the way to go, and, though I don't say this to my own pupils, 3 or 4 practices a week should ensure reasonable progress. [I lead them all to believe that they should practise 7 days a week - that way I usually get about 5 practices in! ]

Re the exams: he will manage the double bass and piano in his sleep. He will be ready by the end of March but the school have missed the deadline so I am not too worried about that.

What I would love is for someone to give me a timetable of what we could do each day and what to focus in on each lesson. We do scales every session because of the disaster last term but should that be once a week to free up time?

Sat/Sun we can do a full and thorough practice but what should I do in the 30 mins available during the week days? I feel the bassoon should take priority but ironically it is the session that takes the longest and is most exhausting.

I would suggest try moving bedtime just 30 mins later and see how he copes? You can always put it back. DD is 12 and she has a 9-9.30 bedtime and gets up at 6.50. She copes well with this amount of sleep.

On practice, It might be more efficient to work on half the pieces one practice session and the others the next to avoid just playing them through. Ideally practice needs to be focussed on problem areas and then put it back together rather than a concert. And yes, I think you could reduce the scales to at least every other practice, maybe less.

Also I agree with susie, if you do double bass and piano on alternate days it cuts out a few minutes warmup time, getting music ready time etc. Nearly double the practice on alternate days might be more efficient and allow for more focussed practice on certain areas.

I have a very busy year 7 daughter. She is in an independent school with Saturday school and is a gymnast at quite a high level (has competed nationally) and is violin Gr 6 standard and does piano (gr 3) and does ballet.
I understand the issues.
I have asked my daughter to give up activities but she does not want to!
So here's what we do- I set up a timetable and explained that she has to do 3- 4 x 30 mins violin prac and 3-4 x 15 mins piano a week. If she didn't keep that up, she has to give something up.
Piano is usually before school. We found trying to fit a 30 min practise in before school was too much!
I am lucky that my daughter does not need too much sleep (she probably went to bed at 9- 9:30 in yr 5- but she has never been a sleeper- which is why her busy schedule suits her). Violin is on a Sunday, Mon and Thur (she has a lesson Tues). At the moment piano is getting v little practice as we are concentrating on Gr 5 theory this term. She trains for gym Friday and Saturday.
I avoid 2 music exams in one term- and when she is doing an exam sometimes we sacrifice the other instrument's practise. I do tell the teachers! They are fine about it.
At school, she is exempt Saturday matches except with prior negotiation with me (she trains 2-8 for gym on a Sat) When she plays matches, she is exempt match tea (if she is at gym by 4 that's ok). She played no Saturday matches last term but she decided she could this term as has no major gym comps til July. Next term might be an issue- she is a good athlete and it's athletics!
I have had to cut back on mid week gym training- but I remain flexible- when there is a major competition coming up I know I will have to increase the training and have her training Sundays and mid week.
My daughter does still get some time to chill- but her busy-ness is her choice and she has to sacrifice some TV watching/ msn time to practice.

It's about juggling! I understand that being a chorister is a problem as that has to take priority- but can you negotiate with matches? My daughter has become pretty efficient at getting her homework done. She seems to coping well academically too.....

With the extra 30 mins, I'd do whatever is the priority at the time.... at the moment for us it's music theory before school!!!! and not practice.... be flexible....

Sorry to be so precise but would this work:

Saturday - full practice as mentioned in initial post
Sunday - as above
Monday - piano as lesson next day
Tuesday - bassoon
Wednesday - possible full practice if no match/finishes early otherwise short bassoon session and double bass
Thursday - double bass
Friday - piano and short bassoon as lesson the next day

Just to add that the scales I do with DS are part of his warm up so should I continue or omit them and find another warm up?

I am going to try and persuade DS not to do G4 Bassoon.

It goes without saying that the hols are filled with daily practice apart from when he is on the odd singing course.

I would suggest that you don't try to cover everything every day. Split the 30 minutes into 3 x 10 minutes, or 2 x 15 minutes and have a rota for instruments / tasks.

Tempting though it might be to take lesson day off for a particular instrument, one of the most effective practice sessions of the week can be the one straight after the lesson when everything is fresh in the mind - consolidate quickly, and less work needs to be done later in the week.

Ask his teachers for a short list of focussed tasks for the week and aim to cover all of these things at least 5 times over the course of the week.

Works for us (child 2 learns 4 instruments, child 3 learns 3). All my kids are crazy-busy but it doesn't seem to have done them any harm. They will never have the chance to be so self-indulgent later in life, so why not let them do all these things while they can? 3 exams aren't too much if a child is ready. Child 2 is taking piano 6, singing 7, percussion 8 this term - she may not get distinctions, but she probably wouldn't anyway, even if she sat them individually. She is as ready as she'll ever be, and wants them out of the way before AS levels next term. We've always done exams in batches, it's no big deal.

And as regards exams, you can only find out about multiple entries with your own child really - it depends how keyed up they get.

DS is used to performing so exam nerves are not really an issue unless he knows he is underprepared.

SueHM,

If DS is asked to do all scales and three pieces should one lesson be scales, and the others one piece each, so he may only do each thing once a week? I suppose he could do two scales each time as a warm up before the one piece which means scales would be twice a week.

I think the key thing is frequent repetition, whatever the material, so I would be tempted to do at least some scales in each practice session (but only the ones that are causing difficulty), and perhaps look at the piece in the first session, identify a few problem areas and work on these intensively in the next few sessions - I've even gone as far as photocopying a piece and chopping out the relevant bars and pasting them on a new piece of paper sometimes (for pupils who really don't know how to practise and need to know that it is these 3 bars that they need to play over and over...)

Focus is so important. It gets results in a way that trawling through everything doesn't. If time is limited, don't waste a minute playing all the bits of the piece that are already OK - spend that minute playing the awkward trill in bar 13, 20 times over. Efficient practice is a really useful habit to acquire.

That makes perfect sense. I suppose I would be concerned that he might forget to play the good bit well if he hasn't touched it for a couple of weeks.

Well you can incorporate some full run-throughs of all his pieces into the schedule, but make sure most of the time is spent on problem-solving rather than "polishing the shiny bits".*






*(the one useful thing I took from a ghastly book called The Practice Revolution, or some similar title - other people will shortly come along and tell you that it is a brilliant must-read!! )

...

MNW, as he's a naturally early riser (he actually wakes rather than you having to shake him), early practice might work, although don't forget your well-being in the equation.

But why not trial the various excellent ideas given here over the coming weeks/months and see what works for him?

Also, although you may eventually devise a timetable, you should view it as the ideal, and not get concerned if everything doesn't get done one week (or even any week).



I love that!

I would be wary about making bedtime later. Other people telling you their child only needs to go to bed at 9.30 is not necessarily helpful. My daughter is 11 and still goes to bed between 7.30 and 8pm except for gym night. She gets up at 6.30 as we leave for the bus at 7.30 and she needs her sleep and always has. I found the elder two suddenly didn't need as much sleep when they were about 13, so she might have a later bedtime soon.

They don't get in from school until 5.15 as they have a long journey by bus, and by the time she has had her tea, done her homework and some music practice it is bedtime. I try to make sure Friday Sat Sun both lots of music practice happen, Tuesday is piano lesson night, so bassoon has to be done before the lesson. Monday and Thursday I'm happy if one or the other gets done. She's in year 7 and so there is quite a lot of homework, but she just gets on and does it, and if time is short a non urgent piece of homework might have to wait until the weekend. Piano practice takes quite a long time these days as she is working towards grade 6 (July?) but I tell her to decide before hand what she wants to achieve. eg getting lines 4 and 5 perfect in a piece. Playing them through once achieves nothing, as previous posters have said.

She has plenty of time to do her own thing weekends and holidays, and the odd night when the teachers have been kind on the homework front. I'm tempted to let her drop the gym sessions 3 hours Saturday and 2 hours Wednesday, but she hasn't asked to and I really don't her to give up on healthy exercise, particularly as bassoon lessons at school seem to fall into PE most weeks.

There are 168 hours in the week, and that is not going to change.

That (over the 80 or so years that we can all expect to live these days) is a finite resource, but it is enough time for most of us to do ANYTHING we might want to do, but not for EVERYTHING that we want to do.

There are limits to how efficiently you can organize your life and it is stressful in itself to have a schedule that means every day is run at full throttle with no slack time or contingency for the unexpected.

When we get overcommitted (as DS seems to be) some things we enjoy (or that we do because we believe them to be essential or important) have to be sacrificed. The alternative (for those of us that are merely talented and hard-working and not super-genius polymaths) is to do nothing well.

So far a thread where every post has been useful and informative! Thanks Guys.

Looks like I need to rethink the way a practice is conducted, allow DS to decide where he feels he needs to improve and put my foot down about the bassoon exam. As it is, although the pieces are not perfect he is nearly there and with lots of practice could do it at the end of this term. But, the last thing I want is him playing these wretched songs for 6 months. I cannot take anymore of Teddy Bears Picnic!

He doesn't need to start at 6.30. He'll be getting washed and dressed, sorting out his bag, etc as he now does at 6.50. He'll practise once he's up. BerkshireSon got up twenty minutes before us for years once he'd started secondary school. He'd get up at 6.40, wash, dress and get his bag ready. When our alarm went off at 7am he'd start 45 mins practice on either piano or clarinet (he alternated). Breakfast around 7.50, which I would get ready for him, and out at 8am.

I realise your son doesn't have as long as 45 mins to practise, but the principle is the same. The point is - does your son WANT to do this? We had a talk with ours about how much he was doing, and HE decided the schedule. At the end of year 7 he realised he needed to drop something, and gave up recorder and scouts. I never had to get him up once at secondary school, because he was keen to do his music. Others we knew who were into swimming or ice skating had a much earlier start time (our nearest ice rink is 18 miles away) and similarly got themselves up.

I'd be wary of doing a schedule for your boy without letting him have some input. Talk to him about it - what does he think would work? Does he need to drop something? The behaviour problems you've mentioned might mean he is already stressed, but doesn't realise it. As Mad Tom says, no-one can do everything. Best of luck!

Glad to be of (some) help, MNW - total sympathy on the Teddy Bear Front - for us it was B1's grade 3 piano Elephant - 10 months of it!!

Plug the sight reading - it's great - you never hear the same dreadful thing twice.

I found it useful to catagorise my scales into 3 groups

GREEN - can play accurately at first attempt (review once a week)
AMBER - can play on 2nd or 3rd attempt
RED - need more than 3 attempts.

I made sure I spent most of my practice times on reds so that they moved up to at least ambers.
And then focussed on making the ambers green
Green ones were practised once a week

Periodically woudl do a review of all to recategorise them.

They pretty much all fall into green now, so I run through them all over a period of 3 days.

I find it helpful to split my practice time into 3 sections:

a third on scales/ tech exercises including long notes
a third on studies
a third on pieces

For pieces and studies I would re-echo what others have said about focussing on the tricky bits. I find it useful to have a goal for each practice and be very clear about what I am trying to achieve. This is something that you son's teacher may help you with.
e.g. rather than just saying "practise this piece" - it maybe " focus on getting the fingering really smooth in bars x,y,z"
I've found that focussed practice with a definite goal will achieve more in 10 minutes than an hour of just playing things through.

I think that rethinking how practice is structured could help.
Playing through everything once is not practice. Can his teacher(s) help with targeting areas to work on?
I start by suggesting to my students that they work on each targeted area carefully and aim to play perfectly 3 times in a row. This can take 5 minutes or much longer depending on difficulty and concentration levels....more concentration can mean shorter practice time. They quickly learn to make the targets reasonable and manageable. Start with small targets and increase if one in achieved very quickly. If it's REALLY not working one day then move on to something else.
Full playthroughs can be included but not as most of the practice time unless immediately before and exam or performance.

This is important.

I have an early riser who puts himself through a punishing schedule of activities, but seems to thrive on it. If you are truly just helping him to get organised, all well and good, but you need to be super-honest with yourself about where the drive is coming from.

Either he is stressed out and over-committed, or he is struggling in other areas and thriving on music, which is his saving grace....or he's somewhere in between. Only you and he know where he is at on that continuum, and the balance may well shift as he gets older.

I must add though that at the moment he only practices on a tues/wed and sat/sun and he doesn't have any matches so finishes at 3:30pm on Wed and 4:30pm on Tues so he is not overstretched yet but he could easily go this way.

Can't he have a new piece?! It's ages until the exams, especailly if he doesn't so his exam until the summer. Home ed boy is doing grade 4 cello this term but, apart from one piece, which he's just maintaining rather than practising, he's still learning new pieces from which his exam pieces will be chosen nearer the time.

I completely agree about doing focussed pratice but children do like to play their pieces through sometimes. That, after all, is where most of the pleasure lies. So I think you need time for both. It would be a shame to lose the obvious pleasure he has from his music making because the schedule is so tight.

There is a comfortable balance for everyone, and a limit to what we can manage. If he starts to go beyond that limit, then some tough decisions will be inevitable. I think all you can do is wait and see how things evolve - things that seem impossible now may become tolerable in 3 or 6 months or a year's time, and his interests may change too.

Don't be afraid to cut him some slack if the need arises. Child 2 stopped piano lessons after grade 1 when she went up to secondary school (dancing and hockey were the priorities at that stage). It didn't stop her messing around on the piano every day for relaxation. Result - wind forward 5 years, she is a demon sight-reader, stopped dancing and hockey ages ago, restarted piano and went straight in at grade 5 with a distinction. Not everything has to be formally structured to succeed, especially if there are other related activities ongoing.

I can so sympathise with the hearing the same tune over and over again. I did Kabelevsky's Clown for my grade 3 piano back in about 1980. My elder daughter learnt it, then my son murdered it for a while and when child 3 started in on it I had to tell the piano teacher I couldn't stand to hear it ever again!

This really is an excellent thread. Brilliant idea flobiano. I hate giving my pupils tests where I mark the scales as E(xcellent), G(ood), S(atisfactory) or P(oor) - although some pupils need the boot up the b** to galvanise them. I shall spend a bit of time thinking how I'll incorporate this into my scale tests in future.

I'm doing something similar to hammer home the Grade 6 scales.
I attempt to play each scale (maj, min harmonic and melodic) perfectly 3 times in succession.
I give each one a score of 2 numbers (e.g 2/3 - means 2 attempts required to play successfully and then managed to play it 3 times in succession).
If a scale gets a 1/3 it goes on the back burner. All other scales are reviewed the following day. After a period of several days I should have managed to get a 1/3 for all scales.
I then start again reviewing all scales.

Sorry... hope you didn't think I was suggesting OP's child so go to bed later- just that I was lucky that my child didn't need much sleep as she is often practising at 8:30pm- 9pm! Mind you- I didn't think I was lucky when I had a baby who didn't sleep night or day!!!
I understand that children, like adults, need different amounts of sleep!

No I didn't think that really, just that someone who had questioned whether their child was going to bed too early would read several posts all saying 9.30 was right for about that age, and my point was that my slightly older child still needs their sleep, and that it's not that uncommon.

My eldest as a baby refused to have more than 15 minutes nap twice a day if I was lucky, but from about 10 weeks slept 14 hours at night. I also know parents who have children that never slept through the night until they started school or later. Children vary hugely with sleep patterns, and it's difficult when they come in from school and say their friends stay up until 10 pm to be firm.

Perhaps the instrument he finds hardest or takes the longest, in the morning while his concentration is fresh?
Scale-wise, particularly for the higher grades where he has more, 1major, 1minor, and the matching arpeggios each day, but therefore playing each several times until they feel really comfortable.
Pieces - for a 4 line piece, why not play 1 line a day, but 4 times, rather than 4 lines once?

If only they were four lines!

An update: DS is going to have to board all the choir nights as of next term. A long story but that's the way it is and is for the best in other aspects of his schooling. So that means we have Sat/Sun and 30 mins on a Wednesday. Will he make any progress?

Yes, if it's really structured practice (as opposed to playing things through), it's probably a lot more than a lot of children manage. He has quite long school holidays too doesn't he?

Not too worried about the piano or double bass but I am concerned about the bassoon because it is a tough old instrument to blow and I think it's easier with little and often. Oh well...

Will there not be any opportunity for him to practise in school either in a practice room or in his boarding house? What do full-time boarders do about music practice? 3x/week practice may not be ideal, but it is better than nothing. You could perhaps do two short sessions on each of the weekend days morning and afternoon, making it 5x/week. If the problem is lugging the bassoon around at school, is there anything useful he can do in terms of practising fingering patterns, breathing exercises? Even just reading through his bassoon music and imagining himself playing it will do some good (I know, big ask for a 10 year old...)

Good idea about reading the music SueHM - will that work for me?

The problem is that when boarders have music practice he is in choir rehearsals and after school he is in the Abbey. I don't feel enough emphasis is put on practice when he is around but the school is excellent in other ways.

I was already thinking of twice on Sat/Sun focusing on different things each time.

I believe there is evidence that thinking your way through a piece is neurologically the same as actually playing it in terms of reinforcing the neural connections - but you have to establish those connections in the first place before this will work!

My teacher says that practicing mentally can be immensely useful. It can be painfully boring trying to recall which fingers are doing what, and hitting which key for the piano and remembering the analasys you did as to what chords are which etc, so it can only be done properly in small doses, but it definitely helps me - it quickly identifies parts of a piece that I don't have memorised securely.

I think the truth is that at the lower grades you can get away with less practice than might be considered normal for a limited amount of time. But eventually the lack of practice will catch up with you. There won't be time to cover more than a very basic or exam focussed repertoire and once the pieces become longer and more difficult, and the scales more numerous, there just won't be time to cover everything satisfactorily. You can't fit a quart into a pint pot! A number of people have agreed that their child practises less on the instrument on which they're not imminently doing an exam, but this only works if exams are taken at different times.

But having said that there are people who seem to make progress with less practice than you'd expect. Normally subsequent instruments are 'easier' in that the player can already read music and understand rhythm and so on. We've had the secenario of children apparently making very rapid progress without much work but it isn't sustainable and sooner or later more time will be needed.

I know your son likes the bassoon and the double bass but needs the piano. I can't help feeling that your best route might be to concentrate on the piano plus one of the others and keep the third instrument 'for fun' for the time being. I know someone who got to grade eight on the double bass in under three years in his late teens (he had three other grade eights) so there's plenty of time to catch up later on.

Your child does an awful lot of different activities, and already has a lot of committments. If this was my child or a child I knew, I would be concerned that life was just becoming one big long timetable, that in some way, any 'free time' also has to be timetabled in efficiently with all the other activities...when does the child have a chance to live? You mention that you sit in on all the practise sessions because then things get done quicker. Another way to look at it is why if you don't sit in, the things get done slower. My belief has always been that quality is better than quantity so I would never quantify practise in terms of time.

People have given you some very helpful suggestions - I'm afraid that mine is of no help at all. I think that at a basic level, we can't all do everything we want to do. Sometimes hard decisions have to be made about what can continue and what can't continue. If we just try and fit everything in to the few hours that are available, we run the risk of having a child who's experienced lots, but settled on nothing. If I were you, I'd take a long hard look at everything your child does, then I think you need to have a sensible and frank discussion about time and committment: what's going to stay, and what's going to go. The kinds of timetables you are suggesting are not really sustainable in the long run.

I really want him to give up the db but he absolutely loves it, moreso than any other instrument and for now it takes 10 minutes although I understand this will increase. Because he is busy - but believe me has oodles of time in the long holidays and does exactly what he wants - I feel sorry for him and want to give him the choice. He'll just have to practice three days a week and if progress slows, so be it.

I have a child exactly like that.... I worry that people will think I'm a pushy parent.... but it's her- she wants to do all these things and won't give them up. She accepts that in the future she won't be able to do it all - but right now, in year 7, she is coping! She gets to parties, she has oodles of friends and , in the holidays, she can have friends round. She knows she can't in term time, due to how busy she is. My daughter, like your son, has long holidays and chills then!
I just have to accept that some parents might criticise me for allowing her to be this busy, but she is happy, confident and does music/ sport etc etc and is doing well in the scholarship set.
My child is my 3rd- my other 2 are really different and my middle child would hate to be this busy. However, it seems to suit child no. 3!!!

mmm...I'm not suggesting your pushy - it's good that he enjoys these things...but, I think the time will inevitably come when choices have to be made, whether's it's now, in a year, or in five years.

One of the reasons we took home ed boy out of school was because the things he really liked and that I felt were really beneficial, like his singing, musical instruments, orchestras and dancing, were all after school or at weekends. Meanwhile he was spending lots of time in school, shall we say, marking time. It seemed logical to spend some of that school time doing music practice (the school stuff takes a lot less time when you're doing it one to one, and even less time when it gets completely forgotten!). He can afford to come home from a weekend's chorus rehearsal shattered and be able to sleep in on Monday. He can play out with his friends because he's done lots of things during the day. I'm not remotely suggesting you should go down this route but all I'm saying is that we were able, by doing something a bit different, to fit everything in. The idea is that when he goes to high school in September he'll be that bit older and still able to cope with it all. We shall see! We found what was right for us. I'm a strong believer that there's always a solution and I'm sure you'll find what works for you.