Teaching My Nearly 4 Year Old Son! Help! Options

[LadyMoonlight]

Is there anyone who could give me some advice on how to get my little boy started on the piano?

We have one at home, which he likes to tinkle on - he uses both hands and all his fingers, which is a good start I think!!

I got to grade 7 myself, not a professional teacher but I thought maybe I could start him off (before he's old enough for formal lessons).

Any recommendations as regards books we could work from or games etc we could play??

[Tequila]

I have one of the Bastien Primers (for young beginner I think....) - nice pictures and builds up to standard notation....

Also you can get him to recognise the position of certain notes and find all of them very quickly on the piano, play them and sing "C" etc (this comes from my friend who's a teacher and a concert pianist)
She says the 2 black notes are "a door" and the 3 "a window" as reference points for the littlies.

You can also build up pitch vocab from this. e,g, "find me middle C" and then "find me a C higher/lower than middle c" " Can you find me an even higher/lower one?" etc.

You can use this idea with all the notes.


Not a lot else to add as I am not a piano teacher and only ever played piano to around G5 level.

My kids also have invented their own game - make "music" to go with a particular thing e.g. Low stomping sounds are "dinosaur sounds" and the high tinkly ones "fairy music" etc....

[Edwardo]

Is there anyone who could give me some advice on how to get my little boy started on the piano?

We have one at home, which he likes to tinkle on - he uses both hands and all his fingers, which is a good start I think!!

I got to grade 7 myself, not a professional teacher but I thought maybe I could start him off (before he's old enough for formal lessons).

Any recommendations as regards books we could work from or games etc we could play??

You might get better results posting on the Teacher forum. For myself, I think four is a tad on the young side to start formal lessons, but I guess if you make it fun it's fine. A note of caution, though - my youngest son (now 11) started copying his elder brother when the elder began having lessons (aged 6 or 7). The younger seemed to be quite musical - in contrast to other children, he played with delicacy rather than banging the keys, and seemed to have independent movement in both hands. Sadly, he's not a pianist - I can tell you, from having got him through Grade I and given up on Grade II.

[Misterioso]

For my youngest piano students I use Tunes for 10 Fingers or the Piano Adventures Primer. The latter, particularly, has some fun patterns / tunes to learn, and it starts off stave, so might be just the thing for your son. I think if he enjoys tinkling and uses both hands and all fingers, there's no harm in beginning something a little more structured, as long as you let him dictate the pace and keep it fun all the way.

Good luck!

[ExpressYourself]

Thanks to some forum advice I bought my 3 year old the My First Piano Adventure For the Young Beginner. It's about £5 on Amazon and he loves it. It comes with a CD of songs and he just thinks it's lots of fun! We also do things from the Jolly Music Beginners Book which is Kodaly.

Both books are for older children - prob 5+ but if you're sensible they are brilliant. I'm not trying to "teach" my son the piano. Just showing him how to use it! iykwim

[Hedgehog]

Best to start with an off-stave primer, like the Bastien one mentioned above. I have used those with very young beginner pupils including my own son. There are also other systems on the market such as Play with Colour, but if he copes well with straightforward notation there's no harm in going straight in with that.

The advantage with the off stave primers is that they go at a slower pace and so a 4 year old need only pick up one idea at a time.

I found with both of my own children that we used holiday times as the time when we did most piano learning because during term time they were quite tired coming home from school in reception class.