Teaching the Keyboard to Kids in Piano Lesson

Video Transcript

"We just talked about a way to get your students to make sure they know the names of the letters on the keyboard. There are a couple of other tricks that I have up my sleeve that might help you out. One of them is reiterating that they start at A. So, have the kids start at A. A,B,C,D,E,F,G. What happens next? Not H. A,B,C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D,E,F,G. This is fun just to go up and down the keyboard. The second level of that is to go backwards on the keyboard, start them at C, and you can just let them know, this is a C at the top and have them to go all the way down. But still, as, as fun as that is, it's, it's not, it doesn't give the level of consistency that they need to see it. It doesn't change their vision of it necessarily. So, go back to where we had started, we had started with D, the easiest letter to learn. Have them show you all the D's, and then have them start playing things like, play me a D, play me a B, go D,B,D,B. Play me a C. Play me an A. Go C,A,C,A. And you might be bristling inside; thinking oh, but I don't know what fingers they are playing. That's O.k. Even if they play it with their elbows, C and A, C and A, it's alright. You just have to like let your blood simmer down, to let that happen for the kids, because what you're teaching them is not how to play at this point. You're teaching them how to perceive, how to perceive these notes on the keyboard, this series of black and white on the keyboard. Which brings up the point that we're not talking about black keys yet. We are only, only talking about white keys. There is no where that you can go without having them know the names of those notes, simply because you can't discuss it with them. You, you have no reference point, they have no vocabulary to talk about it, if they don't know these names."