The goal of your daily home practice is to repeat and reinforce what we cover in lessons so that skills become automatic. In each lesson, we’ll identify tricky spots and work out how to fix them. Then at home, your job is to help your child revisit those solutions and strengthen them through repetition (check out my Practice Games post for ideas to make this part more fun!).
Since the parent is the “home teacher,” practice at home should follow the same structure we use in lessons. Observing and taking notes during the lesson will help you know exactly what to focus on during the week.
Here’s the basic structure of a Suzuki guitar practice session:
Practice Routine
- Warm-Up (tonalization or a scale)
- Review Pieces
- Polish Piece
- New Piece or Material
Let’s go over what each of those sections means:
Warm-Up
This will likely be a tonalization (a simple exercise to focus on tone) or a scale. I’ll let you know which one to use; usually, whatever we do in the lesson is what you should do at home.. Here, the focus is on warming up the fingers and paying attention to things like posture, finger placement, and tone quality. Even one minute of focused warm-up helps your child feel grounded and ready.
Review Pieces
Review is one of the most valuable parts of Suzuki practice—it helps your child strengthen old skills while preparing to learn new ones.
Sometimes we’ll have specific focus points for review pieces. Other times, review can just be fun! Learning a piece is like climbing a mountain, and playing it again in review is like skiing down. It should feel easy and joyful.
Ideally, students play every piece from their current book at least once a week. The more review they do, the faster they progress and learn new music.
Polish Piece
Your polish piece is the newest piece your child can play from beginning to end or a piece being prepared for an upcoming performance. Instead of just playing through it over and over, the goal is to polish the details: better dynamics, cleaner rhythms, more expressive phrasing, and so on.
This is where focused repetition really matters. Choose one short section of the piece (a “phrase”—like a musical sentence), and help your child repeat it slowly and thoughtfully, improving one thing with each repetition. Then move on to the following phrase and polish it the same way.
New Material
When your child is learning something new, the goal is to work in small steps to succeed at every learning stage. Don’t try to play the whole piece right away. Instead, work on just one phrase (or just a few notes).
This stage is all about building confidence. Once they’re confident with that section, you can add the following phrase and gradually link them together. Even when playing multiple phrases, keep revisiting each one individually to strengthen it.
Your job is to encourage your child, celebrate small wins, and help them focus on one step at a time.
Helpful Questions to Guide Practice
If you’re not sure what to focus on during practice, here are a few questions to ask:
- Does the tone sound beautiful, or are there buzzes, “thumps,” or “slaps”?
- Are the rhythms precise, or are there pauses and starts/stops?
- Are the left-hand fingers standing tall and on the fingertips?
- Are the dynamics (loud/soft changes) coming through?
- (For more advanced students) Is the melody clear and expressive?
- (For more advanced students) Is there good nail tone?
Mistakes Are Messages
A big part of learning an instrument is changing our thinking about mistakes. Instead of viewing them as “bad,” try to see them as helpful information. Each mistake is a message that something isn’t working yet. The question becomes: What is this mistake telling us?
For example:
- Is the tempo too fast for today?
- Am I unsure of the notes?
- Is your child distracted or tired?
Once we understand the message, we can work on a solution: slow down, review the notes, or take a short break. Over time, your child will learn to do this for themselves. For now, you can model this mindset by staying calm, asking questions, and focusing on progress instead of perfection.
Practice Time Guidelines
Every child is different, but here are general daily time expectations by level:
| Book Level | Minutes Per Day |
|---|---|
| Pre-Twinkle | 1–5 minutes |
| Early Book 1 | 5–10 minutes |
| Mid–Late Book 1 | 10 minutes |
| End of Book 1 | 15 minutes |
| Book 2 | 15–20 minutes |
| Book 3 | 20–25 minutes |
| Book 4 | 25–30 minutes |
| Book 5 | 30–40 minutes |
| Book 6+ | 40–120 minutes |