Breaking the Finger Number Habit When Teaching Piano to Kids

Video Transcript

"One of the other bad habits that your students may come to you with and by may I mean almost always come to you with is the idea of only reading by fingers number. So, what you'll need is an industrial grade eraser to take their music and erase all of the finger numbers which have been written in for them. One of the problems that finger number that reading by finger number causes is that it takes away their own ability to read up and down which we will get to soon. It also takes away their own ability to read what hand is playing. Is it right hand or left hand? I cannot tell you the number of kids I have had or adults I have had who had seen number four and thought that meant left hand number four but really it should be right hand number four. Now, don't forget the numbers to your fingers, thumbs are one, two, three, four, five and that is extremely useful but it is not useful to read by. So, one of the ways that you break them of this habit is to put their hands on the keys any keys any five white keys in a row. It doesn't matter. Make sure, however, you know what keys they are. Don't just throw them to the wind and have them be on the same white keys for left and right. So, here, I'm covering both F, G, A, B and C in both hands and what I'll do is have the child just play back exactly what I'm doing and I think we did this before. We talked about how it's like a typewriter when you learn to type on the computer. You'll go G, G, G, G, F, G, F, G, F until they associate playing those notes with the notes themselves and not with their finger numbers as quickly as you can break the finger number habit."