Articles
Eleonor Bindman’s “Nourish your music lover” article published in New York Parenting magazine:
Nourish your music lover
Most parents know by now that Mozart is food for the brain and that learning musical notation can help develop abstract thinking.
We want to expose our kids to all that good stuff. Children are natural music lovers, singers and dancers, but when it comes to learning a musical instrument even the most gifted need some help. Music is easily one of the most popular extra-curricular pastimes and a lot of time, money and effort is invested in taking lessons. Yet a lot of that effort, time and — let’s be practical here — money can be wasted.
For those of us with limited musical experience, it’s hard to know what to look for in a teacher. And yet we all know that a teacher can make all the difference in the world. The self-esteem acquired from being good at something at an early age can be a great help during the teenage years and later on in life. Whereas music schools offer plenty of guidance and a choice of teachers on various instruments, private lessons are more convenient for a lot of people. This article was written with the desire to address some of the issues that come up when you decide to invest in private music lessons for your child, to offer some “inside information” on looking for a teacher and to foster realistic expectations for the beginning stages of the lessons.
Finding the right private teacher
Before you shop around to find a teacher, let’s see if you and your child are in a suitable frame of mind and practical circumstances for starting private lessons.…
Read the full article on NYParenting.com