Hello Everyone,

We hope you have had a pleasant holiday break. We have kept busy over the holidays and have a lot to fill you in on. Please read this note in detail, so you know what is happening from now through the spring.

Winter Blues & Practice

It is normal for this time of year to have a dip in all activities, and general engagement and practice at home is no exception.

From now through February we often see kids quit because they are burned out from the autumn, and the less than relaxing nature of the ‘holiday’ season. The cold weather, and short days are also big culprits.

For this reason, it is especially important to support home practice now. While a bit of a challenge, you can work with your teacher to adjust some expectations on a temporary basis until the longer and warmer days start to support the higher levels of energy for the normal level of engagement and practice.

Giving up is not a great option, as it sends the wrong message, and takes away an activity that provides valuable support for structures necessary in professional life: completion, collaboration, presentation.

Dancing with Carolyn – Discounts!

We’ve made a new friend recently – Dancing with Carolyn – a local dance studio that aligns well with our family oriented activities.

DWC has graciously offered us a partnership discount program for our students! Here’s what they have to say:

We are excited to be partnering with ABC Academy of Music families to offer a 20% discount on their first term of dance classes and/or their first Summer Dance  Camp. Dancing With Carolyn offers a wide range of classes for children between 16 months and 12 years old. Programs include:

For further information, please visit the ABC’s partner page on DWC’s website. Dancing With Carolyn! is more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Please contact them at [email protected] or at 416-806-3311.

Please Help Us

This past week you will have received a letter from us about trying to avoid a fee increase this year.

We ask that you kindly consider the two most important ways in which you can help.

Change Your Payment Method

Credit cards are incredibly expensive for us to process. By changing to void cheque or PAP form (a sheet likely available from your online banking that has the same information as a cheque), you will be saving us a huge amount of money.

Leave us a Google Review – Let’s get to 50!

More than ever people’s first point of reference for whether a business is good is Google. They are also increasingly looking at how many reviews a business has, so we would like to ask you to please consider leaving us a 5-star Google review, telling your personal or family story about your experience with ABC.

Click here to leave your review.

If there is anything about your experience that is not a 5-star experience. Please call us to let us know so we can fix it. Our commitment is to make everyone’s experience the best one possible. Remember, we can’t fix what we don’t know about!

Scheduling

There are many scheduling details you should take note of. Do you have your location schedules printed at home? Click here for the right schedules:

  • Oakwood (Lessons)
  • Lawrence Park (Lessons)
  • Music Together
  • Rhythm Kids

Music Together & Rhythm Kids families please note that we believe there is some inconsistency in length of the winter collection for some days in March. We will issue an update to you about this shortly, please stay tuned.

Otherwise, this should help you stay up-to-date on our schedule for your location(s).

Recitals – Moving to Annual

Over the past few years, we have ended up with a shrinking autumn recital. For this reason, there will be no autumn recital in December 2019.

We will appreciate your feedback and thoughts on this, if you wish to provide them.

Emails & Keeping You Informed

We are aware that many parents are interested in communicating with us through more digital means, rather than phone calls. We hope to pilot a texting communication tool this calendar year that will allow you to do this.

It will not be email, as email is not conversational enough to get your questions answered quickly enough, and it will be based in our website.

If all goes well, we’ll have ‘channels’ for you to speak to a front-desk staff, as well as to our teachers (only some of them will be available during the pilot).

Teachers that participate in the pilot will not be expected to answer in real-time, which will likely be an ongoing term of service for this means of communicating with them. They are very active as professionals, and while they will want to be somewhat available, they will only answer these interactions as convenient to their other commitments.

Stay tuned for more on this (soon we hope).

In the meantime, please be sure you are getting our emails (a bit moot if you aren’t reading this now…), and to check your spam and other filtered folders for any old emails from ABC. If they are not where you expect them, find out how to get them where they should be on an ongoing basis. Keeping you informed is extremely important to us.