As many of you know, much of Suzuki teaching is set up to be fun and feel easy. The idea is that the student won't become frustrated, and they won't even realize that they've learned a difficult skill. The idea of playfulness has always appealed to me (however the idea of games has always repelled me--more on that in another blog post). The idea is that when learning is fun, the child will enjoy it and it will feel easy.
That said, it's always been my instinct that it's good to challenge students with something tricky or "fancy" that is just a bit harder than what is the actual task. That can be as simple as standing on one foot while practicing a piece, or a warm up for independent fingers that I give a cute name (fingertwisters or waterslides), asking a child to plan out (with my help) all finger preparations for the first six notes of Minuet 2, or as challenging as a Sevcik style trilling exercise on doublestops. I often take very difficult professional level exercises and warm ups and make just a few notes of them into mini-exercises for my young students. I believe that doing these very small challenges with my students stretches them and gives them better skills so that their actual repertoire feels easier.
I just read this article about practicing and the effects of always keeping it easy, compared to adding additional challenges and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. It really resonated with me, especially regarding this issue of how easy to make a young student's lesson.
Article from https://bulletproofmusician.com, the website of Noa Kageyama:
Why it's probably not a good sign if practicing starts to feel easy
Incidentally, I went to Oberlin at the same time as Noa and his wife, and their daughter was in one of my Suzuki Pre-Twinkle classes several years ago!
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