Teach Piano to Kids – Don’t Make These Mistakes
Lots of parents want to get their kids started with the piano without having to commit to regular piano lessons right at the start. As a piano teacher I wholeheartedly recommend starting out this way as it allows your child to become comfortable with the basics before you send off to a teacher, which can actually be very daunting for a young child with no experience of the piano. Unfortunately, most parents aren’t sure how to get started because they don’t know how to teach piano to kids. There are a couple of things that you’ll need to avoid doing in order to keep your child motivated and help them improve steadily.
Avoid Boring Exercises
When you’re trying to teach piano to kids, you’ll find very early on that there has to be a certain amount of repetition – Unfortunately, that’s just one of the things that doesn’t change when learning any instrument. No matter how much we advance the teaching methods and techniques, we’re still going to have to repeat things quite a lot, because a large part of playing the piano is about muscle memory, and your fingers’ ability to make tiny movements without your conscious mind having to think about it.
Fortunately, this doesn’t actually have to mean boring practice session for your child. There are many games and techniques that can be used to help you teach piano to kids without having to drill them in the traditional sense – they’ll still repeat drills, they just won’t realise they’re doing it. Most importantly, remember to keep things fun, fresh and interesting – kids learn things really easily when they’re feeling happy, relaxed and stimulated.
Avoid Unstructured Lessons
Whilst making sure that your child is having fun and your piano sessions are enjoyable and interesting, you’ll also need to balance this with structuring your lessons with a solid plan and goals. In my experience, every piano lessons without a plan simple don’t go anywhere. My big tip here is to make sure that you know what the lesson’s objective is, without letting your child feel that their lesson is too structured. You should remain flexible too.
I highly recommend using a piano software program if your planning to teach piano to kids. These modern software packages are based on in-depth research about how children learn and the best of them are fun, well structured and specifically designed to aid kids when they’re learning the piano. Following a program like this will help to keep lessons structured, fresh and fun whilst both you and your child learn and spend some quality time together.
My personal recommendation can be found at this page. I particularly like it’s well structured progression and fun, clean and clear graphics. These things all really help when you’re starting to teach piano to kids.
There’s more information about how interactive piano software packages can really make piano easy for kids to learn at this page, where I go into more detail on the points in this article.
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