Piano Lessons For Children - The Best Age to Start

I am often asked by parents of young children what is the best age to begin piano lessons. Well, although I have seen children as young as four start to learn to play piano it is a tall order for most so young to cope with the physical and mental demands.

I specialize in a course designed for very small children which uses a lot of singing and all round musical tuition, but there are the physical hold ups of tiny hands that just aren't ready to use the fingers independently and most children will progress much faster and therefore enjoy the experience much more if they are around six.

It may appear obvious, but there is a marked difference between a five and six year old learning to play piano. It's not just hand size to reach the piano notes but ability to concentrate too. Basic knowledge in other ways of the world makes a big difference too. For example, knowing the first seven letters of the alphabet.

A lot depends 'though on the course offered and the skill of the teacher. When I teach the very little ones I encourage their parents to sit in on the lessons and help to guide their child. I can then lead from the front of the class whilst parents can help to guide their child's hands in to place on the keyboards whilst I move around the class to check that all is well.

Lessons for the very young need to be fast and flexible. Singing, and perhaps even dancing help to develop children's musical skills. Even most adults will find it difficult to concentrate for long if the work is intense.

It not only takes skills in the movements that we produce with our fingers, but our brains have just such a lot to assimilate and analyze. It's only when you think that you're asking a very small child to read two languages at the same time, use their two hands in totally different directions and then put expression and feeling into the music that you begin to realize what a task it is.

I therefore have all praise and admiration whenever I see a six year old, who probably has difficulty reading English, make a success of playing the piano. There are lots of children of this age who cope very well, however. It's wonderful to see a small child learning to sit comfortably at the piano and looking at ease as they play their simple but challenging pieces.

To summarize, therefore, I would say that, on average, seven would be the ideal time to start to play the piano. The child is old enough and physically big enough to cope with the academic work and the size of the keys on the instrument but a keen, musical six year old from a supportive family would probably be far more successful than a sullen eleven year old who is being pushed into learning by eager parents.

Each child and each piano teacher is different. Don't worry too much if the first attempt of getting your child off to a musical start doesn't seem to work out. They have plenty of time and opportunity ahead of them and if the door is left open they can return to and enjoy the experience of making music when their time is right.

Related : Dibujos Para Colorear Compare Price Store Wrest Point

The Children Piano Teachers Don't Want

From a piano teacher's point of view, there are children who are easy to teach and those who present difficulties.

It's easy to teach a child who is calm, happy, diligent and serious.

It's hard to teach a child who is scattered, nervous, unhappy and uninterested.

Piano teachers, bless their hard-working souls, have ways of avoiding these unwanted students.

The first method is to simply wait until the child fails to master the teacher's method, and quits on their own. The teacher loses a little income, but also loses a headache.

Or, since the child is not doing well and knows it, (the teacher has made it clear they are not happy!) the student will start canceling lessons and then the teacher can let them go as a "financial liability." After all, the teacher has to fill time slots to survive.

I have the opposite tactic: I want these kids as students, these failures the other teachers call "quitters."

Why would I want the hardest of students, the ones who wiggle and giggle, the ones who have seemingly no aptitude whatsoever for the piano? I mean the same ones who cancel half their lessons out of apathy or fear or laziness or baseball or whatever.

Simple answer, I want the challenge. I'd prefer to feel the pride when I get a child like this to finally play, however simply, and with a sense of joy.

And most of all, I want to see the look on the child's face as they play something they would have sworn a year earlier that they could never play.

What I find mystifying is the piano teachers themselves.

Here they are in an industry where 90% of the clients are expected to fail, yet they never do anything about it. Why lose all those clients?

The reason, I'm sorry to say, is that some of the teachers are perhaps lazy and not a little bit impatient.

These teachers, either from inexperience or tiredness, know only how to turn students out of their "mill" with as little effort as possible, hence their "method." It's easy for a teacher to follow a standard text from page to page, especially if you've done it twenty thousand times.

If a student is unpromising and unable to toe the line of their "method," they are termed a "quitter" and a "failure" at the piano. These teachers make no allowance for personality, family situation, mood, age, gender, or any one of the ten thousand other things that affect why a kid can or cannot learn the piano at 3:30 today.

It is easier for these teachers to make kids follow a set curriculum, a diet of dry, unimaginative exercises that would chill the soul of even the most enthusiastic child. After all, they followed more or less the same path to the piano as a child, so why should this child not do exactly the same?

This beginning piano curriculum, worthy and valuable to the few people able to master and enjoy it, has not changed in almost 200 years.

Listen to yourselves: you're the same poeple who tell me, "I took piano when I was a kid but I hated it."

I'm not saying the standard piano curriculum will not teach you how to play. Obviously, to be a real pianist there are rules and you must learn them, if only to break them later.

I am saying the standard beginning piano curriculum will only succeed with a very few children, (that same 10%) and the other 90% are forgotten and denied a musical education at the piano.

Look at the statistics: the same 10% who "succeed" at piano lessons are the ones who have an aptitude for the teacher's method, not the piano itself.

If a child comes to me with "no aptitude" for the piano, I make them prove it. Then I find what little aptitude they have.

Every kid can do SOMETHING at the piano. I know because I've taught piano to remarkable, courageous kids with grievous, terrible disabilities, and if they can play piano and enjoy it, you can too.

Like a tiny campfire flame, I blow on that tiny spark of interest or aptitude until the fire burns as bright and hot as it can be.

I believe that every person, especially a child, has a musical spark inside, and that it is the obligation of the teacher to be creative enough to nurture that spark into a flame, regardless of the student's "aptitude" for any particular piano method.

This creativity takes, more than anything else, patience in measures not experienced by most normal humans.

The next time you hear about a child quitting the piano, start wondering if it was the teacher's fault.

Friends Link : Instant Internet Income Guide Violin Shoulder Rest Buy Cheap Women Cardigan Sweaters | LOWER Prices