Congrats! You’ve made the decision to enroll your young child into piano lessons so that they can start enjoying the benefits of music from a young age! What should you expect? Here are 6 ways to optimize lessons.
Provide a quiet room for lessons to take place.
Set up your device to allow a camera angle of the full length of the keyboard from the side (like the picture below).
When we start a young beginner (age 7 or under) in lessons, it’s important for the parent to be with the child for the duration of the lesson for several reasons, mainly: To help the student follow instructions, and to keep their attention on the lesson.
For the first few months, the concepts taught are straightforward for an adult to understand, but the child is still developing their motor control. When a parent is there to physically maneuver the student’s hands / fingers, or posture to match the teacher’s demo, it moves the lesson along much quicker as the child immediately understands what it feels like kinesthetically.
Although we make lessons engaging and fun, the student is still subject to distractions, so it’s extremely helpful for the parent to be there to keep them paying attention! Otherwise, the teacher needs to do that with valuable lesson time.
A mistake is to treat the lesson like screen time (ie. It’s entertaining, so they will be ok on their own). While we do entertain them with stories and music games, they are still subject to outside distractions. We will also teach them concepts that help them make new connections in their brain, and sometimes, they will need your guidance to keep on it, no matter how good their attention span is for their age.
Some concepts take longer to cover. We will keep working on these, repeating or using different methods over several weeks, even months, to help the student eventually grasp it, then master it. This doesn’t mean that the student’s progress is stunted or that lesson time is wasted covering the same thing that they already know. Sometimes, it takes more time to master it to the extent that we would like them to, before moving onto the next level in that topic, but it is always our intent to keep them feeling challenged.
4. Schedule regular practice sessions into your child’s schedule, and build it into their routine. You may choose to do it in a single block of 20 - 30 minutes per day, 5 - 6 days per week, or break it up into two or three 10 minute sessions per day. A young student cannot be responsible to schedule their own practice sessions. The same practice time daily helps with building the routine so that one day, the student may be used to it, and do it on their own!
5. Guide the student during practice sessions. This can be great bonding time with your child as you sit with them to help practice the things that the teacher wrote in their lesson notes, and review the lesson recording in places where you and the student forget how to do something.
6. Use the lesson recording to prime your memory when you and your child forget how to do something. Each week, there is a recording of your last lesson. If your teacher uses Zoom, the recording will be on their G Drive, and each week, it will be replaced by the most recent one. If they use Skype, the recording is right in the Skype chat, available for 30 days. Either way, if you want to keep it, just download it. Students / parents who use their lesson recordings as a memory aid optimize lessons because time is used to learn new concepts instead of relearn old ones. Take advantage of our awesome feature of virtual lessons!
Practicing is as important as the lesson itself, and progress is exponential. It is especially beneficial to briefly review the concepts immediately after the lesson (if their attention span allows). Your patience, time, and energy investment in their musical journey is a gift that you give your child as they learn skills that will help them in all aspects of their life!
We look forward to starting this wonderful journey with you!
~ Kim
Owner
North Peace Piano