I am a piano teacher but I think this would apply to any instrument.

In my experience not many pupils have too much difficulty with the major scales including the black note majors, with perhaps occasional stumbles over Bb and Ab. But the minors are a different matter. I always teach harmonic first being the sensible option for ABRSM candidates, and this is how I do it.

We choose C major, and I tell them that all they have to do from the major is to flatten the 3rd and the 6th notes and - low and behold - there is C minor. We then choose another key at random and we find the same applies. So all we have to do from any major scale you care to mention is simply flatten the 3rd and the 6th to get the harmonic minor Simple isn't it? From grade 6 onwards we do something similar for melodic minors, so that so long as the majors are known any minor can be easily worked out.

Does anybody think there is a flaw in this approach? If so, don't be shy - let me know what you think. Nine out of ten of my pupils have gone along with this method over the years, preferring it to using the AB scale books. The 10th say they 'just remember the pattern'. Of course it is one thing knowing what the notes are - using the correct fingering is quite another matter!

Why should there be a flaw? As long as the pupils can learn the scales then it's a good method. I use that method too and many, many books teach that, so it isn't a unique method and certainly much better than learning by rote. It encourages pupils to think about why a certain scale has a fixed pattern and to replicate that pattern to learn new scales. In all my years of teaching I have never ever used an AB scale book.

The flaw - if there is one - is that it may not build understanding of C minor as a key.

To some extent I do teach minor scales by rote ( -although more perhaps preparing for grade 1, when we are learning a minor and d minor). The exam system is guilty, it seems to me, of putting the cart before the horse here - I would much rather start with the natural minor scale and link it with the relative major. Understanding of harmonic and melodic minor patterns can come later. I don't generally use scale books either - although older pupils who like to get on with it sometimes prefer to have a book and work through it.

I do a lot of work with major and minor triads at the elementary levels, and this does a lot to establish understanding of the 'minor third'.

I'm in a somewhat different position as I teach musicianship, not an instrument - the order for me is all the pentatonic scales, then diatonic major, natural minor (relative then tonic), harmonic minor, melodic minor, modes.

As a child I was taught the 'flatten the third and the sixth' and it meant absolutely nothing to me. It was like having to remember a maths 'rule' and there was no real understanding there at all - it was just a 'trick' in order to get 'the right answer'...

I've said this before (many times!) but solfa really was my salvation in helping me to understand how music works and the relationship between keys, scales, modes..it all just makes sense in a way that learning tricks and rules doesn't, for me (and many others).

I start with relative (natural) minor.
For harmonic minor we talk about the 'unfinished' sound at the top and explore how raising the note before the last on the way up by a semitone gives a more finished sound.

The TG exam syllabus gives the option of playing the natural minor at Grade 1. I used to teach harmonic first, as it seemed 'easier' - but now I prefer to teach melodic, as it avoids the augmented 2nd stretch, which quite a few younger pianists were finding tricky and uncomfortable. Also, it's easier to sing ( the clue's in the title) ; and it follows on more logically from the natural minor.

I now teach natural minors first. I find it really makes sense of the shared key signatures. Then, it is easier to convert a natural minor to a harmonic or melodic minor.

To make it more visual, I have fun with lego. White bricks for natural notes, red for sharps and blue for flats. You can build a major scale from lego in this way. Then you can rearrange or change the bricks to show how the different minor scales are achieved.

I love that Lego idea!! Can I borrow it from you please? All I need now is to find my Lego bricks.

I start them usually on something like A Dozen A Day before we ever look at any minor scales. I prefer the minor mode to come from the major mode of the same keynote, as it's easy to make little 5-finger tunes or exercises sound sad (or spooky or threatening) by flattening the 3rd. Most of my pre-grade 1 pupils can turn any tune into C minor as long as it's still in a 5-finger position. Then often I'll ask them to play it on white notes, but starting on D, and get them to work out whether it's major or minor, and then when we've decided it sounds minorish, I get them to work out how to put it into the major. So now they can play a 5-finger tune in four keys. Never mind the top of the scale for now.

I then show them minor scales by stressing how important the dominant is - anyone tried showing them how you can hear the overtone of the dominant in the timbre of a piano? - and that the seventh note wants to cling to the tonic, because it's magnetism, or gravity, or something, but the sixth wants to cling to the dominant for the same reason. And these sound all right, until you try to go up or down through the 6th and 7th. At that stage, yuou can smooth it out in a scale by making the sixth higher on the way up, and the seventh lower on the way down.

Oh yes, I do melodic minor scales as well from the word go. I've met students with distinction at grade 5 who've never played a melodic minor!

And as soon as I show them that they're like escalators, they get the idea.

I show them both varieties for every scale they need for an exam, and let them choose which they find more satisfying, and there's a predictable pattern. A minor will be melodic, D minor will be harmonic.

D minor is a "mountain goat" scale. The goat will leap across that valley from one peak to another.

All the "funny business" in minor scales comes on steps 6 and 7. It's where the big leap is in the harmonic. It's where the change in direction comes in the melodic. And it's where the harmonic differs from the melodic. And I think the reason children (and adults too maybe) find one type more satisfactory than the other for any given scale is that they prefer 6 and 7 to be the same colour, even if it's blacks up, whites down (or the other way round for C minor)

And don't get me started about tetrachords. The Yuk way to teach and learn scales. Not for this post, it would be wayyy too long!