Can/ does your child play their instrument by ear? What is your attitude towards this?

[goonIcantakeit]

Playing by ear here means working out a tune once they can hear it or hold it in their inner ear, probably with guidance from you or an online tutorial, and does not exclude having some written instructions as back-up.

I would greatly appreciate your responses. I now have an orchestra of 70 in my one day a week job and I need to teach them more independence.
I would also be fascinated to hear how children who can play by ear learnt to do so...

I would be interested to know what kind of tasks the clarinet teacher sets, can you tell me a bit more about it?

Goon - as I wrote earlier, my children learn the violin by Suzuki method. A big part of it involves listening to the CDs of the music daily (we have a cd running all evening). My dcs know the songs really well from listening them. My ds, who doesn't know how to read music very well yet knows exactly how it should sound and which notes to play with a little guidance.

The older 2 can play by ear -dd2 not yet.

Think it helps that they sing, but they have a very classical background so like to have "the dots" there!

GoonIcantakeit - she asks them to work out simple tunes that they already know to sing or listen to: happy birthday, christmas carols, theme tunes etc.

It's not rocket science, but it gives them a sense that they can work it out for themselves and there's nothing magical about the dots on the page.