I've been teaching piano to a 5 year old for the past year. Great little guy. Adores playing, loves lesson, loves practicing

He's tiny, but has strong fingers and a good ear.

His note reading on the stave is excellent. He can name and find the notes on the keyboard very quickly. His standard is approaching Grade 1.

Now for the 'problem'. There's just some things he just doesn't get. High/low for instance. If I ask him which notes are the highest ones (even if I make a really high voice when asking), he doesn't have a clue, but will guess and 50% of the time he's right It's not an aural problem....he can work out a scale in any key by sound, and always seems to know if he's left a sharp out or whatever.

Neither can he tell which notes are higher on the stave when comparing notes. Even though I primarily teach reading by intervals, he seems completely at a loss and unable to tell me whether a note has gone up or down, and roughly by how much. We have tried many times. Slipping it in her and there.

The other interesting thing is that he can't seem to copy a note. For instance, he can recognise B on the middle line, in a flash, but if I ask him to draw it, he'll put it anywhere and no amount of gentle persuassion can get him to do it in the right place.

A big part of me wants him to understand this part....how the notation 'works' as as soon as we get out of the stave, he is completely stumped, and I also think it's a useful skill to have (reading by direction etc.) There again he's managing without this understanding by reading each note individually.

I realise he is still very young, and I'm pleased with his progress to date, even if we seem to have made no progress whatsoever in the reading by direction/high/low bit, but I just have this feeling that if he misses out on this stage, he might struggle a little later on, especially as he seems to be progressing reasonably fast for his age in other aspects.

What do you think?

Oh BTW, we've discussed high low in general terms, turned books on their side etc.

Goodness, he is clearly a bright little chap. I don't think I've got any great answers to your queries, Louise, except I know what you mean about a bit of understanding not being there - You feel there might be a dropped stitch that could unravel later on .

Interestingly I have a nearly-8 with an excellent ear, who has a similar problem with direction, and can regularly dive the wrong way when sight-reading - or even when playing something she knows fairly well. I like to encourage reading by interval too, but she needs to be reminded to focus, and after months of work still regularly confuses seconds and thirds (we still call them steps and skips) . Unlike your little boy though she is also very weak at recognising notes on the stave - which means we struggle all round with reading music. After two years of lessons she is still not anywhere near grade 1. I have wondered if she's dyslexic - but apparently she reads well at school - so something is not clicking - or I'm not doing something that she needs. She is otherwise very positive and enjoys her lessons.

I wonder if your little boy's problem with writing notes accurately is more that his fine motor skills aren't developed yet? He is doing so many things right it must be tempting to focus on his strong points and not worry about the things he finds difficult - if only one could know that they will fall into place later! I have to admit to finding the high / low thing quite puzzling. If you sing two notes and raise / lower a hand as appropriate, can he tell you why your hand moves in the way it does ? I wonder .. just a few thoughts.

I would keep at it, frequently and gently, but don't get too stressed about it. It may finally "click" one day... let's hope. I think the main thing is not to make an issue of it, but to just keep on as you are, trying different approaches. It sounds as if you're doing all the right things already.

Thank you Maggie. Yes, bit scared of 'dropping that stitch' as you put it. It's handy to have a few ways to get around a problem when you are sight reading, and I fear that if he becomes too dependant on reading notes, he may never want to learn any other technique.

I don't think his fine motor movements are a problem as he writes the note beautifully on the wrong line or space

I'll try that idea with moving my hand. Hadn't thought of that. Thanks

Good luck with your nearly 8 year old. Sometimes they just can't see the code however many different ways we try to explain.

Many years ago, I remember asking a girl to write a descending scale. It was in the little white ABRSM theory book (remember them?). Anyway, it came back ascending. I explained again. She said she had done it descending. It obviously wasn't.

It wasn't until I asked her to do it again for me while I was watching that I saw the problem. She did indeed do it descending, but started at the right side of the page and worked to the left.

Alison Thanks. I'll do that. Keep plodding away...you never know. Tis strange though.

I think a lot of this relates to the developmental stage of the child.

To a young child 'high' means 'up there', NOT faster vibrations per second! We often make assumptions and it is very easy to assume that children know what is blindingly obvious to us, eg the difference between higher and lower, and don't realise that it is something we have to TEACH! I do think there is a big difference between teaching and testing, too. Repeatedly asking a child to say which is higher or lower is testing (although of course sometimes you need to ask these questions in order to elicit the level of the child's understanding).

I think it's also difficult for us to understand that a bright child who is advanced in some aspects struggles with another! I once saw a class of 8/9 year-olds sing a song to me in solfa with handsigns - all very fast and fluent and impressive. The teacher asked me to teach them so I started by singing 'Hello, everyone' on a falling minor third, which the children answered. I then repeated the question but around a fourth higher. I asked the children what was different about the second 'Hello'. Big Silence. So I repeated the two questions but made the gap in pitch bigger - and asked the question again. One tentative hand went up. 'Was the second one louder?'

Hmmm - Big Lesson! The teacher had launched into solfa teaching assuming that the children could hear, understand and articulate the difference between higher and lower - but they couldn't.

Sorry - slight digression!

I think it was Dulciana who asked a similar question around 6 months ago and I posted lots of ideas for developing the awareness of higher/lower. I'm not clever enough to search for it or post a link so if anyone can do it for me I'd be really grateful!

One quick idea - I use two puppets, Foxy and Barney. Foxy sings with a high voice and Barney sings with a low voice (when I first told Bagpuss this she looked long and hard at me then said with a sigh, 'You are a SAD woman' ). I hold Foxy up high and Barney low and each in turn sings hello to the child/children. The child answers by singing 'Hello, Foxy' or 'Hello, Barney'. I encourage them to try to copy the puppet's voice as well as identify who it was who was singing. (This gives a whole new connotation to the sentence, 'Now sing it in your Foxy voice' ). When I first do it I move the puppet as he sings but then take that clue away. Later the child puts his/her hand high or low as he/she answers. The more that you can combine aural, visual and kinaesthetic experience with the correct vocabulary the more the child's understanding will develop and deepen.

If no-one can help me with finding my previous posts I'll post again as much as I can remember!

Regarding the writing on the stave problem - again I think it's developmental. A teddy, to a five year-old, is a teddy whether it is on the bed, under the bed, on a chair or standing on its head - it doesn't become something else because it is in a different place. I know the child can read the notes on the stave really well but he clearly is not yet at the stage of truly understanding this concept in all its manifestations. The skill of reading words is always ahead of the skill of writing; I'm sure it is the same for music.

Have you tried using a large card or piece of felt with a stave drawn/sewn on to it? You can then used counters or felt circles to make the note heads and move them around, giving the child kinaesthetic experience. For an even bigger experience try putting tapes or ribbons stretched out across the floor to represent the five lines - ask him to jump onto the 'B' line or into the 'C' space, for example.

Best of luck - he sounds a lovely student!!

I used a staircase in a pupil's house once to try to help them understand how the notes on a stave move up and down.

The young child concerned was completely turned off by five lines drawn close together and did not want to spend time with it.

I eventually made some cards with the letter names of the notes on each one. The bottom stair was E and it went up from there. At the same time I drew a large stave out so we could relate the stairs to the stave. If you stand in front of the stairs it looks a bit like a stave and it worked very well with this child and many others after.

He was eventually going up and down the stairs to find out and understand where each note lives.

It's not a perfect method but it worked well and involved an activity using movement which is always a good thing for children.

Thankyou Cyrilla. You're such an expert when it comes to teaching the little uns

I really need some puppets! Wonder if dear husband would stand in

I think it really threw me as his reading is so good. He can obviously recognise where the note is positioned by sight. It's hard to get my head around the fact that he can't reproduce it in the right place when writing it.

I have used counters on a large stave, but not for a while. Perhaps I need to go back to that. I'll certainly do the large staff on the floor. I've done that at school with rope...never thought to use it at home. He'll love that.

He's such a sweetie and always brightens my saturday mornings

Aw, he sounds lovely!

Er - NOT an expert, just been at this game for more moons than I care to say .

Let me know if Dulciana or anyone else can't dig up my previous post and I'll post again.

Is your husband going to be Foxy or Barney???

This is an interesting thread with some really helpful responses - thanks to all.

I suppose my only reaction is that 5 is still very young - hardly into mainstream school and we are expecting him to be fully conversant with opposites (ever tried to get a 5 year-old to be reliable in understanding right from left), read fluently, have sorted out his visual-spatial reasoning and play the piano all in one go. Have you ever tried to get a 5-year old to write beautifully on a straight line? Many find it a really hard thing to do, so maybe writing on a stave is no different?

I think I'd go along with all the things others have said but also encourage you not to panic yet. He's very young and I think, if you just keep gently reinforcing your message to him in lots of fun ways (Foxy and Barney look-alikes sound great) you'll get there in the end.

Incidentally, one general thought about reading and dyslexics. There are some types of dyslexia where the person can read quite well - but they may have short-term memory problems, organisational and spatial difficulties. My offspring was like that - read nicely from aged 6 but couldn't write sensibly, or construct a sentence properly, add up, remember what books were needed for what lesson and so on. Went on to get a good set of "A" levels, having had an educational assessment and been given extra time in exams because dyslexia was diagnosed. However, it took several years of frustration and knocking on doors to get this sorted. Just because your pupil reads ok, it doesn't necessarily mean they're not dyslexic.

Hope your little chap continues to love his music for all time. He sounds a splendid pupil.

Good luck to you both.
Oboist

Yes, it was me who had this query in the past, and this is the thread:

http://forums.abrsm.org/index.php?showtopic=14773&hl=


A little further down the line now, myself, my advice would be to be very careful not to put this child off! My child was fully prepared for Grade One at the age of 6 and a bit, and by this stage could even make a reasonable stab at the sight-reading. He wasn't always guaranteed to get the first note right, as he didn't know his lines and spaces all that well, but he could play and read pretty well by interval if he did get that first note. What stopped me from putting him in for the actual exam was that he just suddenly decided he wasn't doing it! (He was entered and the fee was paid.) I'm still analysing why - he had got a Distinction in the LCM's first exam when he was 5, and the whole experience was positive, but I wonder if I put him off by homing in too much after that on things that he just wasn't developmentally ready for.

He is not playing at all now, because he said he "couldn't be bothered with all that". (I didn't really know what he meant at the time, but I think now that he meant that he couldn't be bothered with me pushing the notation and the aurals. Cyrilla's point about "testing" is very valid. Musically and rhythmically he was streets ahead of children much older, but he still didn't understand higher/lower, and struggled with things like flats and sharps. He knew when to use a black note, because it sounded right, but he didn't get the concept at all. In retrospect, I think I started thinking about exams too young, and if I could go back in time, I wouldn't go down the exam route at all - certainly not yet. There is always a lot of discussion here about the rights and wrongs of what is on the exam syllabi, in terms of aural tests, sight-reading, etc, and about what it means to be a "rounded musician", rather than somebody who "just plays", but in this case it was my focusing on this "rounded musicianship" that put the child off.

Somebody - probably Cyrilla! - said that aurals are too much tested and not enough taught, which is very true. The trouble is that most of us do tend to teach by testing; we just keep "practising" them, as in testing them, till a higher proportion of the answers start being right. It's something I've been thinking a lot about, generally, ever since, and I tend to incorporate the aural aspect a lot more into the pupils' playing now, rather than make ear tests the thing that you just do at the end of the lesson. In fact I think the tests on the exam syllabi are very limiting, and make it all too much of a seperate issue. I think aurals and sight-reading should be allowed to develop naturally, intrinsically, and at their own pace until about Grade 4, without being pidgeon-holed by the confines of exams. Even if we don't do exams, we tend to feel that our pupils shoud be au fait with it all before moving on to the next level. At Grade 4 or so, these things tend to kick in of their own accord, and suddenly start to crystallise in terms that are defineable for a younger child. They can often "do it" before then, but they really haven't always got a clue what it is that they're doing! Where scales are concerned, interestingly, this child had no problem at all; he could play two-octave scales with ease in several keys, looking at the piano, without always needing to be told what the black notes were.

I'm taking it very easy with him now. He's in a choir and loves to sing, and I'm hoping that he'll show an interest in the piano again when he's a little older. My eyes are open to any opportunity to channel him back again, but I'll be doing it my way, and not being such an idiot as to feel that I have to follow the traditional route of teaching with a timetable of everything that the exam boards require in the order that they require it.

Good luck with your young student!

Patricia.

P.S. There is a piece on the old Guildhall Grade One syllabus, called "Stairway", by Christopher Norton, in which the LH descends by step, like walking downstairs; you could try this as a means of explaing "getting lower", if you could get hold of a book.

Thank you Patricia. I'll go and have a good read on the other thread. It's good to know that it's a developmental thing, guess it'll be something that will just come with gentle support

I think he'd like to do the exams, as his brother has done a couple and he's green with envy , but it's not my target. He already does do SR in the form of little extra books I give him to 'play through for fun', and aural which includes bits from the grade 1-2 syllabus, but other things aswell.

I'll know when it feels right and it's not just yet He's certainly capable, but there's more to it than that isn't there.

Part of my problem, too, was that above-mentined Junior, has three older brothers, who have done very well at exams and festivals, and who always got a fiver for ToysRUs when they were younger after the exam was over! So this seemed to obvious way to go with him too! Do watch out for anything else that Cyrilla might have to say - she knows what she's talking about with young children!

One of my pupils is a 4 year old boy. I was a little nervous about teaching him as I have not taught anyone this young before (except my daughter and then it was a mother/daughter thing and if I did something wrong teaching-wise I put it down to experience).

He is absolutely not as advanced as this little boy sounds. However, I have not started writing with him yet and I intend to make myself a felt, or other suitable material stave, with velcro notes so that during the lesson, maybe making a game of it, he can put notes, or clefs (if my sewing skills run to it) on to the very large stave which will be on the floor. It will be a bit of a game or a treat for doing something really well in the lesson.

I do start writing with children in little manuscript books, but I think that 4 or 5 is really quite young and I am certainly not worrying about this yet - it's mainly about recognising written notation at present and aural work - he sings in tune very well (thanks, Cyrilla, for ideas during the CT course!!!)

Hence my daughter's seemingly bizarre remarks about cello intonation. "It's too high so I need to go higher."

Translate to "the note's too sharp, so I need to move my finger up towards the scroll."

Er - thanks, Patricia, for the vote of confidence though I certainly don't have all the answers! I'm still learning and will continue to do so until I turn my toes up...

Oh, Susie, did I meet you on a CT course? Forgive me if I did and I've forgotten! Anyway, I'm glad that some of my ideas about singing and so on were helpful!

Sorry to harp on about child development, but I really think it is crucial to have some knowledge and awareness of this.

This is, of course, a generalisation, but young children learn EXPERIENTIALLY while older children learn more INTELLECTUALLY, so you have to bear this in mind when planning the activities you use. Young children learn a lot through play (more enlightened countries look aghast at the English practice of putting pencils into four year-olds' hands when their children of the same age are out exploring in the woods, developing vocabulary, discovering through doing, etc etc etc... ).

One example regarding how the child's level of development can affect their learning - Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, did a lot of work on the development of cognitive functions in children. In one experiment he put five toy cows close together in a field and the child counted them. He then, in front of the child, put five cows spread out in another field and the child counted them. 'How many are in this field?' 'Five.' 'And how many in this field?' 'Five.' 'Which field has more cows?' 'That one' (child points to field with cows spread out). And it doesn't matter how many times the child will happily tell you there are the same number in each field, he/she will still tell you that there are more in the spread-out field when he/she is at that particular stage of development - because at that stage 'more' means 'bigger'. (Connections with 'high' meaning 'up there'!) It is impossible to 'force' a certain level of understanding on a child who is not yet at the stage of being ABLE to understand it in the way that we do.

Grrrrrr to the government for not enabling instrumental teachers to have this sort of training in such essential psychological and cognitive issues!! *see rant in neil's 'Group Teaching' thread*

This reminds me of a recent cello lesson that I had, when my teacher kept telling me to "shift up" or "shift down". I found it really difficult, as to me to shift up is to go towards the neck of the cello, but to her shifting up was shifting up in pitch, so you move your hand down and vice versa (is that right? - oh dear, I've got a cello lesson tomorrow ... ).... and I'm not a five year old, and I do understand the principles of a stringed instrument! Obviously your daughter is reasoning in the same way, kerioboe.

I have a degree in psychology and I still bogged up with my own son! It's hard sometimes to see the wood when you're surrounded by trees. *off to read rant in group teaching thread*

True. Which is why I wanted to check that it was a developmental thing, rather than something I was doing wrong. Not that I ever do anything wrong

I remember having this girl who kept throwing confusion into the pot each time I tried to teach something (this was the one that did the scale backwards).

She was a bright lass, but always managed to see things a different way to most. I remember when she was about 8 or 9. I asked her to put a dot after the note. She had seen it many times before, but never written it.

She put in front of the note. I mentioned that we put it on the other side and she said "but that's before the note". I thought she was messing about for a while, but she wouldn't have it, so in the end I persuaded her that before or after....it goes there

When I finished the lesson and she was gone, I asked my husband to put a dot after the note (he doesn't read music at all). He put it in front of the note too Couldn't believe my eyes. I had drawn a crotchet....he saw it as a 'person', marching along the music, the dot went after.

I then asked him to put a dot after a sentence and he said "ahhh, but that's different"

Getting back to me little lad. To be honest, I rarely teach this age group and thought long and hard about taking him on. He had moved with his family over to the UK from NZ where he and his brother had been doing the Suzuki method. The local Suzuki teacher couldn't take them on, so the mother was planning to send them to a non-Suzuki teacher. I could see all sorts of problems that might occur (especially with the older one who was towards the end of Suzuki bk 2.

My son spent 3 years in the Suzuki method, so at least I had some understanding of the method, and could move them towards a more traditional way a little more smoothly than most. Nothing against the Suzuki method, I that I'm not a Suzuki teacher!

I took them both on and the transition has been relatively smooth.

I teach preschool music classes as well as piano, and all my 2,3 and 4 year olds have a good idea of high and low, because we do it each week. If I sing up a scale they will lift their hands in the air and if I sing down a scale they will drop to the floor. Even small babies will lift their eyebrows for a high note.

The piano students that haven't had these lessons - well it's 50/50 really. I think it's something that we all have the capacity for - but if it's not used it gets forgotten. Loads of children at 5 don't get prepositions at all.

Things that have helped:

Doing my preschool exercises with them, using their whole body.
using tracing paper over a scale with a picture of a hill on it, drawing a stick man walking up and down.
The Hall Leonard Book 1 has a climbing frame with 5 bars and two children, one child has her head between the top two bars, and then I ask the child to show me which note her head is on the stave.

At the moment I am using the first five notes of the scale. Feet is C, Knees D, Tummy E, Shoulders F and Head G - I'm using the example of Santa getting stuck in the chimney, so we'll do it right a few times and then santa gets stuck in different places.