I have heard it said that most people that have a life-long love of playing music can either play by ear, or sight read. We started our sprout on Suzuki-method

I have heard it said that most people that have a life-long love of playing music can either play by ear, or sight read. We started our sprout on Suzuki-method violin at an early age, and I learned a whooooole lot about how to teach skills (not just music) from that. We had an excellent violin teacher. First of all, it has to be fun. It is more important that practice be fun every day, than it cover all the assigned material every day. It must be kept fun. And incremental -- the teaching points are introduced gradually so that nothing is frustratingly difficult. Just keep having fun every day, and emphasize playing well and correctly, not on racing through more material for the sake of some kind of false progress. The early stages of Suzuki-method, of course, emphasize ear training. When the kid reaches 6 or so (early reading stage), they also start to learn to read music -- and by then they are likely playing Vivaldi concertos, learned by ear, so ear-training is well established. Eventually my kiddo also learned to sight-read. But throughout -- it has to be kept fun. Yeah a constant diet of classical is great for teaching skills, but you want to use those skills on fun stuff. The lucky thing about violin is the huge body of traditional fiddle music from several cultures, and also jazz fiddle. And the local Suzuki teachers put on a weekend fiddle camp every year that was hugely fun as a camp experience over-and-above the music activities. Anyway, kid developed life-long love of music, still plays pretty much every day, after coming home from day-job as an engineer.