I am grateful to have the freedom to homeschool our children and help them learn different things on an ongoing basis.  Our most recent experience with this has been in the area of music.  As my longtime readers know, we are a pretty musical family.  (If you are a new subscriber, here are a couple of my husband's band's music videos that I have shared before -  Adrenaline Addiction

Under Pressure - Cover

Each of our kids have had varying degrees of musical interest.   They have the opportunity to play with various instruments we have around the house – a piano, my old flute, smaller sized electric and acoustic guitars and a full size drum kit.  Our youngest likes to sing and needs her own microphone if she’s hanging with us when we practice.  Our oldest had expressed interest in taking piano lessons when he was about seven.  He has also performed on stage in musical productions.  Recently, he has been expressing interest in learning how to play the guitar.

Now you would think this would be a no-brainer.  We bought him his own electric guitar and mounted a hangar for it on the wall in his room.  We set him up with some video lessons and a couple of basic books to refer to.  On top of that we figured since my husband has been playing guitar for so long and I have some classical guitar lessons behind me, we’d have it covered.  That all makes sense, right?  We were so wrong!

We were assuming he’d just jump right in, be motivated to do it and ask us for help if he needed it.  Weeks went by and the guitar hadn’t been touched more than a few times.  When I asked him if he liked the video lessons he said he did but I still didn’t see right away why he just wasn’t running with it if he really wanted to play. 

After some consideration, I realized we apparently forgot that with some things he really enjoys learning through direct interaction.  It turns out that this would be one of those things!  The videos just weren’t interactive enough and couldn’t replace an in-person human teacher for him.  I also realized that just because we are musicians doesn’t automatically mean we know how to break it down simply enough for a beginner to learn without getting frustrated; not to say we didn’t try!  We had a bit of our own egos to swallow to admit this but once we did, it was easy to figure out the next step. 

My husband and I enjoy going out to see live bands and have started to get to know who’s who locally.  We discovered that one of the guitarists we have seen live that we liked just happened to also offer lessons.  We signed him up and he is doing really well.  While we understood that it is most important that the teacher not only enjoys playing the type of music he wants to play and can play it well, it is just important that he must be someone that our son enjoys learning from.   Thankfully we chose right!

The YouTube Video above is what I promised I'd share the other day!  This is my husband's band's original "Adrenaline Addiction."  The band did all of the recording and mixing as well as the video editing themselves.  The camera operator was the friend of ours (and her 16 year old son) who produced the video I shared in my last post What is Homeschooling? An introduction.

Even though we are all about our family, John, and I place a high priority on setting a good example for the kids.  This is just one way that John shows the kids that if you want to pursue your passion, don't let anything stop you.

Tomorrow.... My post will be about how we spent our day Thursday!