You’ve found a great teacher for your child, teacher and child get along, and everything seems to be going well. A few weeks into the lessons, you ask her to show you what she’s been working on and her fingers hesitatingly produce a cacophony of musical nonsense. Clearly this can’t be worth the pretty penny you are spending to educate your child! Maybe music just isn’t … inside her!
Relax! All is well. You’re doing the right thing by arranging for piano lessons and even though you may not be a musician yourself, there are ways you can help your young child through her initial few months of lessons. With your help, she can become self sufficient at the piano, work well with the teacher, and look forward to time alone at the piano every day. This involves a little bit of self-education on your part, to help get her on the right path. But soon, with the guidance of a good teacher, your child will respond to your inquiry with something that sounds like music!.
Here are 10 ways to help your child with piano lessons.
1. Help with directional issues
Younger children have a tough time understanding direction in music. This can make instructing them, especially in the online teaching era, more difficult. Here’s a primer. On the piano, down is to the left and signifies the lower notes in pitch. Up is to the right and signifies the higher notes. This can be tricky for kids, so please have them remind you what the lowest note and highest notes on the piano are, which way is “up” versus “down”, which hand is their left/right, etc. You can even have them start on a random note and play a “Simon says”-style game using middle C (the C in the middle of the piano, see below for finding where middle C is) as your starting note and commanding them to go up, down, to the highest and lowest notes, etc..
2. Learn names of notes
Our music alphabet goes from A to G, of which I love to remind my kids by asking them where H is on the piano. In the picture below, the keys are labelled with notes. Feel free to get some white stickers, put them on your keys and label the notes for a couple of weeks. Get your child to learn to recite the alphabet from G backwards (G-F-E-D-C-B-A) and do it while playing the keys. This will help them really learn where notes are on the piano. Because the keyboard is organized in a repetitive sequence of two black keys followed by 3 black keys, you can find all instances of a note by observing its relationship to the black keys. So, for example, all Cs sit to the left of the two black keys and all Fs are left of the 3 black keys. Sharp notes (#) are a half step above the reference note and flat notes (b) a half step below (see two sections below for explanation on half steps).
3. Learn basic music notation
One big hurdle your child will face learning to read music is understanding how notes are represented on the staff (the group of horizontal lines and the spaces between those lines that written notes appear on). Notes are either on a line or in the space between lines. The grand staff for piano music has two clefs (systems for giving us the pitches of notes): treble clef and bass clef. Treble clef (the top clef which looks like an ornamental ‘S’) is for the middle to upper register of the piano, is usually on the top staff and is for the right hand to play. Bass clef (the bottom clef that looks like a backwards ‘C’) is for the middle to lower register of the piano, is usually on the bottom staff and is for the left hand. They are not to be interpreted the same — note how the lowest line of the treble clef is the E above middle C while the lowest line of the bottom staff, in bass clef, is the 2nd G below middle C. This makes learning how to read two-handed piano parts quite challenging in the beginning! It does make sense – having to cover 88 keys, piano notation efficiently allows us to read music that covers quite a wide range of notes. Have patience because it does become second nature over time. Having a guide printed and ready to consult (the one below should do for most beginners) will make learning to read music much easier:
4. Learn intervals.
The distance between notes is called the interval. While there are many intervals, to get started you should only know a couple of interval at their most basic level.
The first interval to know is the step. A step is when you go up or down one note on the piano. An example would be to go from ‘A’ to ‘B’ or ‘E’ to F’.
The second interval to know is the skip. A skip is when you go from ‘A’ to ‘C’, skipping over ‘B’, for example.
The last interval to know is the octave. An octave is when you go from a note to another of it’s type. This would mean, for example, to play ‘middle C’ and then play the ‘C’ above or below that.
You can play a similar “Simon-says”-style game with your kids, instructing them to go up/down a step, a skip or an octave!
5. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm
‘Rhythm” is a surprisingly difficult word to define and I won’t attempt to do so here but rhythm is an incredibly important component to your child’s success with playing music. One way to understand it is rhythm deals with how we feel music in time. While pitch is rather easy to understand on the piano, (you hit a key, it makes a sound, we label that sound with a letter from A to G), time can be divided in many ways. When learning to read music my beginner students have struggled the most with rhythm and often don’t even know they are struggling with it . Music needs a beat to feel good and your child needs to develop a beat. Here’s a simple exercise that will strengthen both you and your child’s rhythm.
- Hold a note on the piano and count to 4 while holding the note. Please start counting as you hit the note. This is a whole note. (e.g 1-2-3-4). It last for four counts or beats. The speed at which you count is what we call the tempo.
- Do the same but count to 2 and then strike the note again, on the 3rd beat. (e.g. 1-2, 3-4) This is two half notes. Each half note lasts two beats.
- Do the same but play on every beat. This is a quarter note (e.g 1 , 2, 3, 4). A quarter note lasts one beat.
- Now do this exercise going seamlessly from steps 1-3 and then repeat it. Again, for a whole note count 1 2 3 4. For a half note, count 1 – 2 – 3 – 4. For a 1/4 note count 1 2 3 4. (The bolded numbers are the beats where you are striking a key, non-bolded ones are beats where you are holding the note). Below is how this exercises would look notated.
The more you do this exercise, the more you both will feel the difference between, for example, a quarter note and a whole note. Knowing this type of difference is what will help take your child’s performances to the next level!
6. Practice every day
The importance of consistency with young children is well documented. In addition to practicing, kids should be thinking about music every day. Even if they practice and mess up a bunch and seemingly make no progress, they’re getting used to having music be a regular part of their lives. This practice time can be as a little as 5 minutes and make a huge difference in the long run.
7. Allow for plenty of mistakes
Monitor your child’s practicing but please don’t feel that you need to correct every mistake! If you know they’re making a mistake, occasionally ask them if what they just played was right or wrong or if it could be better but there’s no need to constantly stop them while practicing and demanding a better product. Let them learn to hear mistakes and take their time. This builds a sense of independence and avoids them feeling afraid to try new things and make mistakes. it’s far more important for them to experience music a lot than for them to chase perfection. Practicing isn’t always fun, but we don’t want your child to dread piano practice either.
8. Sing songs together
If a child is learning a song, have them sing it at the dinner table, in the car, on a walk. Sing songs together that you like. Sing songs they are playing in their books or learning in lessons. Singing music is the most organic and direct way to connect with music. Musicians always say “if you can sing it, you can play it”. We educators really are trying to build the connection between what’s in the child’s ears and coming from their fingers. Since singing a piece requires the singer to internalize it, playing it becomes that much easier.
If you notice your child (or YOU!) consistently sing off-key, trying “matching pitch”. This is a basic ear training exercise where you try to recreate the pitch of any note – whether it is sung, plucked, played, etc. – with your voice. If you cannot do this, try practicing it a little bit every day to improve.
9. Listen to music at home and go see live music
If you want your child to have an interest in playing piano, try finding music that features piano in it. Classical, jazz, gospel, motown, pop, tango, singer-songwriter, rock and a plethora of other genres of music often highlight the piano. Play this music at home and in the car. It doesn’t need to be a deliberate thing; you just want your child to hear this music in the background and develop positive associations with it. Absent real-world examples of hearing piano, very few students will ever develop a passion for playing the instrument. We do not learn in a vacuum! While seeing music live right now, when concerts are quite rare is hard, plan to do it when society opens back up. A trip to see great musicians perform live will inspire you both! Ultimately, the more your child loves music, the more they will want to practice and play music.
10. Take lessons in parallel
If possible, you might want to take music lessons alongside your child to better help them along their journey. It is less important that you take piano lessons than you taking any kind of lesson, so long as it’s an instrument that you’re passionate about. Moreover, this gives you a chance to grow artistically on your own and share that journey with your child. At a young age, when they still look to you for inspiration, your kids will surely notice your musical efforts and see music as a part of their family life. Eventually, this will afford you chances to play music together, which is an amazing experience. Every kid will react differently, of course, to your music making but this may help motivate your child.
11. Have them teach you!
Once in a while, sit at the keyboard and ask them to show you some things they know about the piano. In medical training, they say “See one, do one, teach one”. We learn even more by teaching others how to do things, which is one reason I love to teach! Getting their brains going just opens up one more pathway for them to absorb music and make it their own.
-Alex
Alex Clough's Blog 