Piano Lessons Children Portland

Using Familiar Songs in Children’s Piano Lessons

Most beginning children’s piano books are overly concerned with finger position. For this reason, they start with "songs" made of entirely original musical material designed to show the child how easy it is to keep their five fingers in a row. The result is uniformly boring music, which never excites the child in any aural or musical way. The only reaction they have is to your praise if they succeed in playing it correctly.

This is an exceedingly poor choice of material because children have much more positive responses when the first songs they play are familiar to them. Their reaction becomes one of amazement and pride as they hear a familiar tune from the piano.

Piano Lesson DVD…

Let’s take the first "song" in most conventional piano books. It almost always consists of the first three to five white keys, in a row, going up. It’s the same, more or less, in Bastien, Schaum, Thompson, Alfred and any other conventional piano method you might name.

To step back a moment, the strategy behind all these worthy methods is solid, but the material they choose to illustrate is poor.

Here is the strategy of all beginning piano books:

First, play all five ascending notes on the white keys starting with Middle C.

Second, do the same as above but have one note change direction to teach the child to pay attention to the direction of the notes (up or down.) In other words, throw in a little monkey wrench, in terms of linear direction, and see if they can catch it.

Third, do more or less the same, starting on a note OTHER than good old Middle C.

Fourth, do the same but with a skip between notes. Previously, all note movements have been the adjacent white key to prevent confusion.

You can see the progression of events like a chess game: we’re teaching the child to move on the keyboard in terms of the printed page only. It’s like a board game with five squares. Within that limited scope, we teach the child how to move around via the five notes on the page. The steps are solidly constructed, but there is one huge problem:

Your child will fall asleep before they ever have a chance to get excited about piano.

There are many problems with this methodology as it’s applied today.

First, if your child takes one of the hypothetical steps above, one a week for four weeks, they will be so bored with piano that it will be a miracle if they don’t quit. And that curriculum is exactly what you’ll get from the average piano teacher.

Piano Lessons Seattle WA…

Second, the child will have no aural joy in playing something they recognize. There is a subtle rise in self-esteem when a child feels they have controlled the piano and played a song they know and like.

Third, the method above does nothing to give the child a pleasurable, purely physical experience of the piano, just plunking happily away at a series of keys with no reference at all to a page or notes. Call it the Joy of Piano.

This is the essence of what a real pianist does, simply playing the music without CURRENT reference to the page. You should show them this first, before you do anything else.

As to the four steps of the conventional lesson above, here are better ideas.

First, play I’m A Little Teapot to learn the first five adjacent white keys.

Second, play Alouette to throw a little twist into it.

Third, play Mary Had a Little Lamb to show how to start on a note other than Middle C.

Fourth, play Jingle Bells to learn how to skip over notes.

Now you have a first lesson that teaches the same concepts as conventional methods and in addition gives your child four songs they know and like, which they can proudly play.

Author: John Aschenbrenner

John Aschenbrenner is an Emmy Award Winning Composer and a leading children’s music educator, book publisher, and the author of numerous fun piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER for kids.
See the PIANO BY NUMBER series at http://www.pianoiseasy.com and http://www.pianoiseasy2.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Aschenbrenner

piano lessons portland

Playing the piano is a dream for most…At Sherman Clay Portland, we want to help you realize that dream!

the beginners guide to music lessons

For piano students this lack of note reading and theory will make it take longer to learn new pieces and they will tend to perform pieces less accurately…

List of Piano Teachers giving Piano lessons at Portland

If you are staying in Portland, Oregon and searching for great piano lessons, you might be interested to read this post…