My First Piano Adventures 7

And the adventures continue.......In a little green house far, far away my MFPA students made great headway in their lessons this week.

My goal for the present will be to help all five recognize and quickly find the white keys by name, the music alphabet. That starts with a sure knowledge of how to locate middle A. My suggestion to them is to first locate the three black bears in the middle of the piano; other wise known as black keys. Starting on the lowest or left side say "Papa Bear, next, Mama Bear then slide off mama and you will be on A. 

The next step in key recognition is to locate th group CDE.

They surround the "twos", black keys, that is. In the lesson book Dallas helps with this as he tries to find the rabbit in his hat. (pg.41. The rabbit is hopping from key to key. Can your child tell you which key he is on?

With the introduction to the FGAB keys I also introduce the sneaky thumbs. The thumbs come out with the rest of the fingers "hiding" in a loose fist. On the piano the right thumb finds F and the left thumb sneaks up to C.

Here M. is showing her sneaky thumbs. 

Now the rest of the fingers "come out" and do you see how this sets up a nice rounded hand shape?

A game I play to encourage my students to learn the name of the white keys is "Guess the Key"

We keep score of who gets points,. D. and I are tied this week. He gets a point if he can tell me the name of the key I point to. I have to close my eyes and hear the key he plays and tell him without peaking what the key name is. He is motivated to learn his key names and I am motivated to practice my relative pitch listening skill. I must always remember that just because a student can do something once, or even twice, does not mean the skill is internalized. That is where repetition becomes the key to progress. Remembering finger numbers is a skill which can disappear from time to time. 

Here is J. making some music glasses using fingers 1 and 2. We can make glasses with 1 and 3, 1 and 4, and so forth. Again, just a way to reinforce skills learned but easily forgotten. I found a quote about reading which applies well to playing the piano. You can tell what your child's independent music playing level is by what songs she can play without help.Those are also the songs she loves. They make sense to her and they are the ones she loves to play. What song does your child love to play? Leave me a comment at the bottom of this blog. I would like to know.

“Fluency develops as a result of many opportunities to practice reading with a high degree of success. Therefore, your students should practice rereading aloud texts that are reasonably easy for them – that is, texts containing mostly words that they know or can decode easily. In other words, the texts should be at the students’ independent reading level.”