Reading Notes for Children's Piano Lessons

Video Transcript

"So in lesson four, your kids are introduced to the piano. They are introduced to what notes on a page mean. Now you put it together. It's really cool. Again back to the little Mozart series. These two cards are extremely helpful. They show notes going up and they show notes going down. So, if have been able to teach them which way up and down is on the piano, you then can teach them if they look at these notes then that means they must move down. So, choose any key, doesn't matter what key. Here. Then I've got to go down and down. It's really cool. The opposite, choose any key. It doesn't matter. Then I go up and up. They can go big up as huge as that or they can go a little up. It doesn't matter it's the idea that it's moving and it's connected to what that says. So once that happens , you now need to approach your fingers. In piano, your fingers have numbers and in guitars they have different numbers but in piano, they have numbers that take all five into count, your thumbs are ones, twos, threes, fours, fives. If you put them together like this like sort of doing subconsciously they match; ones and twos and three and fours and fives. They don't match anymore. Now it doesn't make any sense. So keep them together for a while and have the children can you type your ones, can you type your twos, can you type your threes. Typing their fours is going to be the hardest. Your four is your naturally weakest finger anyway and it's very difficult to keep all of these finger tips together and pull just the four apart. Try it. Today at home. Try it. It's going to be trippy. Five is pretty easy. So that's reinforced together when it's easy pull it apart, put it on the piano and have them play threes, fours; it doesn't matter what notes, just have them play the finger numbers. It's kind of difficult and it's going to take a while to get, but eventually they'll get it. It's not insurmountable. It's just a little bit difficult. One of the things that you need to watch out for at stage is that the child doesn't do this; closed fist one finger. It's very very common, very very common, but you want to never allow that behavior to happen because it's reinforcing a completely incorrect thing and it doesn't allow any playing to happen. So always always you need to see all five of their fingers and that's something that you can just say over and over. I need to see all of your fingers; all of your beautiful fingers. I need to see all of them. Even if you're just playing with one, I need to see all of your beautiful fingers and so when they're practicing threes or fours you see everything. The other thing is to not let them sort of bang at this point because that was fun when they were small two weeks ago but now that they're big that behavior is not really productive. So this takes some time to practice making the fingers go to the piano and in their certain numbers, but once that happens you're onto bigger and better things."