Explaining the Piano to Children

Video Transcript

"And for the third lesson, now that your children know how to read in rhythm or see the notes on and they mean something to them and they're not just crazy pictures anymore. You take them to the piano. And on the piano you will ask them what do you see? You see black and white keys. That's all you see. It's pretty easy. They come in a certain pattern. Not all the kids will be able to see this. Not everyone sees this, and that's okay. What you will see when you guide them, is that they see threes and twos and threes and twos and threes and twos and threes and two etc. You can call them, I patented this, call them the triplets and the twins, and they'll love it. Once they see the triplets and the twins, see if they can find all of them. There are seven sets of each. See if they can find all the twins and all the triplets. And just play them, let them play it loud, let them play it soft, how ever you want to play them. Let them just do it. Once they see how the piano is laid out, then ask them if they can hear which part is high and which part is low. Some kids have a lot of problems with this. They maybe able to hear high and low, but they again don't know how to articulate it. So it's your job to put words into their mouth. And this, these are high keys. And down here, these are low keys. To get those words to attach to those sounds. They probably can, again they probably can hear them but you want to attach words to sounds. So listen to high and low. Then ask them to play, there's all sorts of things. Ask them to play high, three times high, three times low. Play me the highest triplets you can find. Play me the lowest twins you can find. etc. etc. This is the hardest part. See if they can hear whether you are going up or whether you are going down. Let me turn it up a little bit so you can hear. I'm just going to move my hand up on the keyboard. The sound went up. They might not hear it, and you'll just have to reinforce over and over. That this sound means meaning up, it sounds like it's going upstairs, it sounds like it's going up higher into the universe. It sounds like if you were singing it, your voice would have to get higher. But again if they have no reference for high and low or up and down, it's hard. But eventually it will break through. See if they can hear low. This is going lower. It doesn't matter what you play. Just see if you can get it to go down and up and if they can hear the difference between. Ask them to close their eyes and tell you if you went up or down. Ask them to try to trick you, say I'll close my eyes and you move on the keyboard and tell me if I went up or down. And they should be to do one or the other. And if you get it wrong on purpose, they'll love it. And they'll be like I'm smarter than you. It's great. So those are all the things you can cover in the third lesson."