I have a child taking Prep piano in a couple of weeks time.
She can play the pieces and the tunes well once she has been reminded where the starting notes are, particularly with the tunes which have to be played from memory. I have given her the starting notes in her practice note book and asked her to try to remember them and today we went over and over the tunes, trying to get her to move from one tune to the other and to try to "photograph" where her fingers are lying for the next tune. It worked after a while but I am really worried that this will happen at the test and the examiner may not help her like I do to get going. Any suggestions gratefully appreciated!! She has always had a big problem matching notation to the notes on the piano.
Barbara

Desperate times!

Would it help to draw a little keyboard at the top of the piece marking the starting spot?

I had one lad go into his grade 1 with a cow drawn on the LH and a face on the RH he didn't stick with it for very long afterwards.

When I had a pupil with the same difficulty, we built the starting note into the title of each exercise:
"Walking the DOG - thumb on D", "GRANDPA Rocking in his chair - thumb on G" and a spot of subtle graffiti turned "Hopping" into "Bopping - thumb on B". As Digby says, "Desparate times" but it seemed to work!

Mind you, I had a pupil who had never had a problem with this before but apparently sailed into his test and played everything perfectly - except that his hands were covering the wrong notes... Luckily, the pupil was completely unaware that anything was wrong, and the examiner just wrote a humourous comment about it.

I've had this problem with some kids as well, mainly for the three exercises (because on the pieces I write it in - in big fluo pen ! i.e. 'G position!!!!' written above Boating Lake with rings round the first notes and their names).

In the lessons before the Prep tests, for those who found it tricky, I'd do a lot of work just on the starting position i.e. every few minutes, in between each other thing we were working on, I suddenly say "show me how your hands are to start 'Rocking'", (few minutes later) "how do you start Hopping?" etc.etc. I didn't get them to play the exercises (as you say, that's not the problem) , just show me the starting position (LOTS of times). I'd tried methods to get them to remember them but finally it was just the repetition that went in.

This must be quite common, and it's probably because of the ability of the human mind to work out strategies to dodge things that require too much effort! I have one who has already got a Grade 1 merit, and who reads quite well by interval, but who STILL struggles sometimes to get started on pieces, and the cow and face thing still get themselves the wrong way round. It might not be what you want to do if an exam is pending (that old chestnut of early grade exams actually being more of a hindrance than a help...) but taking time out and doing some formal theory - at the piano - and lots of supervised simple sight reading too - does help reinforce what they half know.

I have to ask: what is the cow and face thing?

All cows eat grass and FACE to read the space notes, he could never remember which went with which clef.

For my younger pupils, I call the bass clef not only the "F CLEF" but also the animal clef because it has cows and birds in it: All Cows Eat Grass (space notes), and Green Birds Don't Fly Away (line notes). Not sure this is any kind of help at all, but just thought I'd mention it.

I find that younger pupils can get very confused with this kind of thing. One of mine started talking the other day about 'every cow....'
Because of this, I've started encouraging them to remember just the space note names, so that they have FACE for the treble and All Cows Eat Grass for the bass and are able to work out the line notes from them. It seems to work.

I do that when I use anything at all.
Having 2 sets of things to remember for each clef makes confusion very easy.
If they understand how the notes go up form line to space you don't need a mnemonic for both and I wouldn' use one at all until they do understand.

Yes - I agree that four sets of mnemonics are confusing for many, and I avoid them - until FACE becomes useful. We don't always get as far as ACEG!

I think perhaps where they come into their own is in theory as a quick reference - but as Sbhoa said, the understanding has to be in place first - learning a set of codes doesn't replace that.

I don't know if I was an odd case but I never latched onto FACE. For me it was the sound of the string of letters EGBDF that did the trick, although I can't actually remember ever having struggled with the problem of naming notes on the stave in the first place.

I've used this approach with some pupils and it seemed to work.

When all's said and done there's no pass or fail and examiners for the prep test aren't usually too pernickety, so don't worry too much.

Thank you all for your input!
Barbara