Better Practice Blog- Staying Involved For Busy Music Parents
Staying Involved For Busy Music Parents
For working parents, juggling the demands of work and trying to stay involved with our children’s activities is hard to do. We pay for activities, but our time is limited so it’s hard to stay involved as much as we would like. Do you find yourself asking questions including: Did my child practice today? What did my child practice? And how well did my child practice?
If you’re wondering any or all of these things, you are not alone. You want to know they are putting in the time working on their craft, learning their musical instruments and having fun while doing it. The Better Practice App can help solve this problem and answer all of these questions.
Did my child practice today?
Better Practice App has a new feature that can send out an Email notification once your child starts practicing. This particular feature is optional, but I have found very helpful in our household. This feature can be great for parents who have to stay at work late or for parents who may be away from their child on certain days of the week. You can always know that your child is keeping up with their craft. And, you have one less nagging question to ask when you come home, “Did you practice?”
What did my child practice?
Through the weekly view in Better Practice, you can have a more in depth view of what your child practiced.
On the weekly view page you can see:
- Exactly what they practiced and for how long they practiced each piece. It will also show a total of how long they practiced, and a total of how long they have practiced for the entire week.
- The pieces they struggle with and the pieces they are feeling good about. The students rate their practices so you know how they are feeling about the process as well.
- You can view if they covered all the current items that their teacher assigned to them.
- You can see what tools they used during their practice. Including, sheet music, metronome, backing tracks, and videos.
How well did my child practice?
A report is good, but it’s not enough. How about listening to your child play? Hearing my child play gives me great satisfaction and I love seeing the incremental improvements. Embarrassingly, it used to be that recitals were the opportunities when I actually heard my child play. It shouldn’t be that way, and now it doesn’t have to be. The app also allows your child to attach recordings and they are sorted out by the most recently recorded items, so it’s easy for you to hear the latest! You can stay involved almost as if you were with them every time they practiced.
- You can simply check these recordings in the Library tab. The recordings are conveniently sorted by the most recent, and the recordings of the current week highlighted in red.
This is another great tool that makes it easy to check how well your child has been practicing this week. You can also listen to older recordings to listen to your child’s progression throughout the weeks of hard work. After listening at work, I love sending my child an ‘Atta Boy’ and I think it helps his motivation because he knows I care about his progress.
At home, because you know exactly what your child is doing, you can talk to them about their progress, and talk to them about certain things they need help with. Because you know precisely what they are working on and how they are doing: it truly gives them the feeling that you are with them through the whole process of them becoming a wonderful musician.
All of the features helped motivate my child through their practices, but I believe my child feeling the extra support knowing I was still involved and a huge part of their musical journey.