Learning an instrument can provide the following
advantages to elementry students:

As the student continues with music education, their
following skills strengthen:

1.Comprehention. Learning to perceive and derive meaning from musical sounds V for example, to identify a musical theme V sharpens your childs ability to comprehend abstractions.

2.Problem Solving. The ability to understand a problem and reach an appropriate solution is one of the most important skills your child can learn. Learning the basics of musical language, such as harmony, or interpreting a work through performance teaches this skill.

3.Logical Thinking. Applying particular lessons to other problems and situations requires sound reasoning. When your child learns to analyse a musical work from a cultural, structural, or historical perspective, or to improvise within a certain musical style, both inductive and deductive reasoning grow stronger.

4.Making Value Judgements. Learning to comprehend, consider, and evaluate in music can help your child make informed decisions in other aspects of life. Discriminating between great and lesser works or justifying musical choices in compositions can teach your child independent thinking and how to make and uphold value judgements.

5.Using Symbols. The ability to use symbols distinguishes the human race among all forms of life. Learning to read, write, and interpret musical notation provides access to a nonverbal world to thought and strengthens the use of other symbol systems as well, such as mathematics or language.

6.Conceptualizing. Your child learns to classify and generalize by learning to identify different types and styles of music, to recognize how different cultures use music for personal expression, and to recognize common elements in different works.

7.Communication. Perhaps the greatest gift of music is its ability to cultivate our feelings and thoughts through nonverbal means. Being able to express theses feelings and thoughts V and to respond to them in others V is part of every successful program of music study and indispensable in your childs total development.

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Can I learn music as an Adult? Am I too old?

I've heard people say that they wish they had continued music lessons as a kid, but now they are too old to learn. I beg to differ; in my experience, adults make the best music students and usually the best musicians, no matter when they started playing. If you are an adult and are thinking of learning to play, there are a few general things to keep in mind.

As an adult music student, you bring much more to the table than a child brings to the study of music. You bring desire, life experience and physical maturity.

First, you have desire. You want to learn. You want to make music. You 'know' you want to learn. The desire is yours and comes directly from you. You are the person with the vision and the dream of making music.

Next, you bring a life-long body of knowledge and life experience with you into your pursuit of music.

Of course, you're going to have some road blocks that some children don't have. Lack of time is probably the first and biggest enemy. You have many more time commitments that will demand your attention. You're tendency will be to be frustrated with slow progress as your fingers won't do what your mind is telling them to do. You can also be stubbornly successful when you really want to be.

Set your mind like this: Success in making music is in the journey, not in the destination. It is never too late to learn, so with that in mind, let's play music. The advantage you have as an adult is the fact that you probably really want to play music. Where children sometimes want to experiment for a short while, adults usually have thought seriously about it.

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