General Info

Hello, and welcome to the Homewood-Flossmoor Suzuki Strings. Suzanne Rickman is the founding director of our program, which has been in existence since 1993. We maintain a faculty of four, with Suzuki trained teachers on violin, viola and cello. For specific information about our program, refer to the parent guidebook listed below, which lists policies, fees, group times and other important information about our program. Our purpose is to offer quality music instruction to students, by which means we will help to nurture in them a love of music, art and beauty, self-confidence, appreciation, respect, discipline, and self-love. The Homewood-Flossmoor Suzuki Strings adheres to the teachings and philosophies of the great pedagogue, Shinichi Suzuki. We believe that all children have talent when nurtured and developed properly! The Suzuki method, also known as talent education, and the "mother tongue method," was developed by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki in Japan. After his study of the violin in Germany as a young man, Suzuki returned to post WWII Japan with a new idea and new life mission. He had an epiphany, and that was that all children have talent. He realized that all children speak their native language, and that learning and using language, requires complex brain functions. If all children learn to speak, he realized, then their brains must be functioning at a very high level. Suzuki also realized that it is the environment that nurtures children to speak, being that children only speak the language, and sometimes languages, that are spoken to them. Nobody is born with the "talent" to speak a language they have never before heard. All children learn to speak by imitating the language they hear in their daily environment. Parents repeat simple words for their baby, and are encouraging as the child successfully imitates their sounds. Thank you for your interest in the Homewood-Flossmoor Suzuki Strings. Please feel free to email or call the director, Suzanne Rickman with any questions.