Closing the Note Gap When Teaching Piano to Kids

Video Transcript

"So, we talked about having the student look at the things on these cards. We're on other cards perhaps cards that you make or dryer baseboard to see the idea up and down. One of the difficult things is as one of our producers here in the studio pointed out to me this is really, really easy to see. This is not so easy to see. So, bring them back to the music that their playing presently. These kids are already playing music with little more advance. They’re not baby music yet and take out one of my favorite materials the color pencil. Ask the child to play connect the dots which is a fun game for all ages. Starting at the fat of the note, the only part of the note we care about in music is the fat part of the note. That stick is just kind of annoying. That stick just tells us a plain note but really what we like the fat part of the note. So, start at the fat part note and if you can draw a line from that fat to the next fat part then you can tell me if it goes up and down. This has a few in here in dangerous one is your kids can't draw straight lines so it doesn't really look like it's going up and down. The other is the nature of music that it's hard, it's difficult. So, it might be a way to bridge the easiness of this gap or the easiness of this with the level of difficulty of this by writing your own music. If you have dryer erase board or some blank paper and you can draw staves what you're doing is closing the gap between. So, you start with big notes and then you slightly smaller, slightly smaller until the size of real music and then by that time the connecting the dots is not so difficult. So, once they've drawn this line in whatever their favorite color happens to be, ask them to play it don't make them play the right notes. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that they went up and down at the right time. What also matters and this is something you need to keep in mind twenty four seven is that the rhythm does matter. Even if the notes don't matter, the rhythm does. So, perhaps you can't see it from here but you'll get to see it if we'll close up in just a second. This note is a half note. It gets two beats make sure that they play, play, play, play, play, play, play, play, play, play, sit down. Make sure that they give that two beats even if they’re not playing the right notes make sure they give the right rhythm."