Elementary Music Education

Best Parents’ and Music Teachers’ Resources in Music Lessons for Children

Why Music Teacher Education Is Essential

Does your child have musical talent? Does he want to learn to play a musical instrument? Congratulations! If you were not ready for it ahead of time, you have to take care of finding his first musical teacher who will play the main role in his musical education right away. In order to do this, you can ask all your friends and other people to recommend you a good teacher or a few of them, but it is far from being enough... You need someone who has had music teacher education.

It is of primary importance to choose a teacher who has gone through a music teacher education program. If you are not familiar with the basic criteria your search for the music teacher – who will perfectly suit your undoubtedly talented child – should be based on, then your search (and the main thing – result) will be similar to playing a game of lottery. And how lucky are you in the lottery?

In order to be ready for what you might expect in the future from your child and yourself, and to avoid the hidden issues, I suggest you find good teachers from reputed music teacher education programs.

In most cases the children are delighted by the musical lessons in the beginning of training. Their natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge takes over. Even parents are overshadowed sometimes as the music teacher, at some point, is put on the pedestal and becomes the child's favourite. He can tell such interesting things! But it happens only until a certain moment in training.

With time when the curriculum and tasks get more complicated, the language the music teacher uses, unfortunately, becomes complex. This is where the training at music teacher education programs comes useful. Right at the beginning of training the teacher will behave kindly and explain a new material and show it himself for the child to understand. But gradually the teacher starts to get out of “the child's shoes” and becomes more strict and demanding. He thinks that the time of being childish is over and it is time for the child to recognize the responsibility of daily practices (half an hour or one hour per day depending on the task and age of the child). If the teacher remembers what he learnt at music teacher education, he will find a better way of handling things.

This time is especially hard for the mobile and restless children. They quickly lose attention and self-control during lessons as their teacher transitions from using kid language to the "professional" one. What does this imply? The thing is all little children are great visionaries and this quality should be used in the educational process. To achieve correct movements, reading of notes, counting, sounding and the rest of what is necessary for working on a piece of music, you have to use children's imagination. The real music professionals who’ve had proper music teacher education understand what I am talking about and what I mean.

If the teacher quickly transitions to "adult" explanations and requirements, it starts to tire the child and consequently he does not hear what the teacher speaks or even demonstrates for the most part of a lesson!

Not having understood a new topic or task during a lesson, the young talent obviously does not know what to do at home and how to prepare for the next lesson, and literally “serves his time” by an instrument, but the most important thing is he altogether loses the sense of why he is doing it! Music teacher education trains you in how to think from the perspective of the child.

When someone does not understand something, he loses the most important thing in training – interest towards it. And here the teacher, who at some point was the most favourite and important person in the child's life, turns into a monster that starts complaining about inattention and laziness of the child. Parents in turn start to force the small musician to study more at home. And if the child is forced to do something he has ceased to like, it can slowly but surely lead to depression, and in the near future you will find yourself replacing the music lessons with lessons in psychology.

What are the signs that your child is losing or has already lost interest in music lessons? It is not that difficult to notice; all you have to do is look into his eyes that have lost the spark. And now recall his mood after his first music lessons and compare it with the present...

If your teacher utilizes his music teacher education to good effect and uses a competent approach to training, perfectly knowing the psychological characteristics of children of different ages, he should be on the top of things!

Music Education Books for Moms Are Here