Practice Tips: Charts

Leslie Thackeray offers many varieties of free downloadable practice charts on her website The Practice Shoppe. My own students have a customized guide for weekly assignments and for review, and we also keep charts in the studio to record the number of days practiced for our "100 Days of Practice Club" but some of these charts Leslie offers can also be utilized for making repetitions or review more fun.

A few sample ideas:

"This week, let's see if you can do one scale for each Lego Man!  Let's see... there are 20 here, so you could do 4 scales every day for 5 days or 3 scales every day for 6 days plus 2 on the 7th."

"Here's a bullseye chart! Let's take those two measures you are working on.  Each time you play it, decide if you were right on target, or somewhere else on the bullseye.  Mark one of the targets each time you practice it. She wanted you to repeat it 6 times every practice day, so we should be able to mark 36 this week.  Next week we'll continue with a different project your teacher assigns and it will be filled up before we know it!"

"We are going to color in one star every time you play Twinkle, and show it to your teacher when every star is colored.  That's 100 times!"

This is what I'm going to do myself:

Using the "Fall in Love with Practicing" chart - 30 leaves - I will color one in every time I review one Suzuki book.  Tonight I played through books two and three.  Two leaves colored!