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Ah, the age old question. I will elaborate. Learning to play piano on a musical keyboard has significant drawbacks. 1) The full name for the piano is “pianoforte.”  In Italian, this means, literally, “soft loud.”  The precursor instrument to the piano was the harpsichord.  On a harpsichord, no matter how hard or lightly the player… Continue reading Beginning students: piano or musical keyboard?

Very often, as adults, we learned to tell our left from our right so long ago that we do it reflexively, with hardly a though for it. For some young students learning to tell left from right is quite a challenge. Here are some ideas for teaching young children to identify left and right hands.… Continue reading Teaching kids to identify left from right

There are two main parts of learning to play a piece:(1) Basic mechanics — understanding which fingers play which notes, how long notes are held, how to follow the notes on the page, and so forth.(2) Polishing!Polishing is when you put all of the pieces together and combine them so that the piano playing sounds… Continue reading What does “polishing” mean?

(This post relates specifically to Piano Adventures Level 1 beginning group piano class.) One of the challenges of doing group piano is that everyone moves at a little bit different pace, and in a classroom setting everyone needs to be kept at about the same place to facilitate group instruction.  If your child is ready to… Continue reading Group Piano – My child is moving faster than the class

Finding it difficult to read the notes on the staff and translate them to the piano keys is a very common hurdle that must be overcome.  Here are some tried and true methods for helping kids with this. Ensure the child has a thorough understanding of the letter names of the white keys. If this… Continue reading Strategies for Teaching Kids to Read Notes on the Staff