Pages

▼

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Teaching Your Kids To Play The Piano

We recently bought a 2nd hand piano because my girl seems very interested in learning to play. Before getting the piano, she was tinkling on my mom's keyboard. I've thought her to read the notes, so she is quite okay in playing. Initially, she just played with her right hand. Eventually, I took out my old piano books and encouraged her to play with both hands. She is better than me in one aspect: After playing the piece using the notes, she will commit the song to memory and play without the notes. That is one thing I cannot do.

Now that we've got the piano, the other 2 boys also will go over and tinkle about. So far all they play is Old McDonald Had A Farm, the chiming of the clock and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I'm trying to get D1 to learn to read notes. We're going bonkers with Old McDonald Had A Farm :)

I've opted not to send the kids to a piano teacher or music school. They just want to play for fun and I don't want to kill their passion with music exams. We will see how it goes a few years down the road. Plus, piano lessons these days are quadruple the price what my mom used to pay for my piano lessons. Just checking around, the average price now is about RM80-RM100 for beginners. I have 3 kids, that's too much money for me. I learned until Grade 5. I think I can teach my kids a little bit.

Anyway, I found some great stuff online. If you want to teach your kids to play the piano, you might find these helpful.
I know there are more cool stuff out there to help our kids learn music. I'll keep this list updated as I go along. I'm also enjoying my piano playing once again. Haven't been playing for so many years.
Before I go, enjoy the magic of Jon Schmidt. He truly is a one of a kind pianist. Very inspiring.

This piece is called All Of Me and it was this piece that I was introduced to his music. I fell in love with it straightaway. Hope you like it too. Watch for the part where he uses his whole arm to play.

5 comments:

  1. Yannie17 August, 2011 12:12

    Ai Lian, I send both my girls to music lesson. I need to sit in with my younger for her music course. I haven't invested in a new piano, as I want to see how well they like it. By the way, I also don't want them to sit for piana exams. I told the music teacher the same thing, I want them to enjoy and have fun. No theory homework and no exam.

    ReplyDelete
  2. chinnee17 August, 2011 19:36

    Lian, thanks for sharing. I was lucky because my mum decided to hand our childhood piano to me, but like u said, going to lessons are extremely expensive if the child choose not to continue with it after a while. Hence it is very important to find out if they really like before we send them to formal lessons. Meanwhile, we can surely just teach them ourselves, at least at the beginning stage. Thanks for sharing the resources!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very Involved Parents20 August, 2011 17:23

    Hey, you have done the right thing to let your girl to enjoy and have fun with music!

    Recently, we've also started sending our 4 years old boy to modern music class to let him expose to different type of music instruments first before enrolling him for formal piano lessons.

    Anyway, thanks for the music sheets.

    Regards,
    Very Involved Parents

    ReplyDelete
  4. Giftedmom26 August, 2011 17:57

    Your sharing of the web to download music sheets comes in handy for me. Today is my son's 'final' music class. I've been contemplating to google for websites for those music notes. I will definitely download the sheets and print for him to learn at home.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Technosalons27 August, 2011 02:57

    Thnx man for sharing this valueable info!

    ReplyDelete

Don't go without saying something. I would love to read your comments. BUT no junk comments please.