One of my young pupils (aged 5) has developed a habit in the last few weeks of naming notes wrongly. When we use flashcards and i hold up middle C for example and ask her what note it is, she'll say D, E, F, G. She knows the names of the notes as we've spent time on them. The strange thing is though, that she will give me every other note name except for the correct one, so i'm sure she's aware what the correct answer is but for some reason gives me the wrong one. Same thing happens when i point to notes in tunes. I'm unsure why she's doing this and also what to do about it! I'd appreciate suggestions please! Thanks.

Try effective questioning: show two cards and ask which is A and which is C (etc. etc.) In that way, you've given the answers, but she's got to work out which is which. In this instance, the element of guessing has partly been removed.

She is not trying to play silly games with you is she ????

Exactly !

When you hold up the card and say 'play this note', does she play the right note ?

Is it just the naming she's got confused with or is messing you around with ?

Frankly, if she's playing the right notes, I'd drop the naming exercise for a while.

I often get a surprised rection when I get them to complete the question - what is guessing? Guessing is a quick way to get it - "

Many of them will say "right" and be surprised whn I tell them it's "wrong"

Guessing can be a difficult habit to break, and it also extends to the habit, when they know they're wrong (either because they can hear it or because I say "no") of just GRABBING at the next nearest possibility. It's one of the few things that I tell them is "naughty"

Try agreeing with her wrong answer. You'll know by her reaction whether she was giving the wrong answer on purpose

Ooh, sneaky! I like it!

Sounds like she's bored with this game and is trying to make it more interesting!

Yes, that's what I wondered, which is why I'd drop the note-naming exercise for a while and just make sure that she's actually playing the right notes.

If she can sight-read a piece correctly or work out a completely new piece for herself from one lesson to the next it doesn't really matter if she can't/won't name the notes correctly . . .

[quote][quote name='Halka' date='Mar 12 2012, 05:09 PM' post='1134853']
[quote name='hammer action' post='1134787' date='Mar 12 2012, 01:02 PM']
When we use flashcards and i hold up middle C for example and ask her what note it is, she'll say D, E, F, G. She knows the names of the notes as we've spent time on them.
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Sounds like she's bored with this game and is trying to make it more interesting!
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Nice, thought and you could be right - she might be having her teacher on. However, this is something which has happened to me on several occasions, mostly with children under the age of 10 but one or two older ones as well. They appear to know the names of the notes, appear to read reasonably well and then, suddenly they seem to have forgotten everything.

I do watch very carefully to see that the concepts are being acquired, that enough revision is done, that activities are varied but lots of the same material seen. I watch to see if they are playing by ear or memorising the pattern of the keys. I do everything I can think of to be sure that when I am teaching the reading of music that is exactly what the child is learning. But that hasn't stopped me occasionally discovering a little later that everything seems to have gone out of the window.

This has happened very recently with a nine year old who after two years of reading quite nicely suddenly can't seem to remember anything much about the notes on the page or the keys on the piano. Yet she remains cheerful, and motivated!

An interesting parallel is that when I was class teaching juniors I found a similar thing happened sometimes .
in mathematics - concept grasped and used correctly and then - nothing.

If the OP's pupil is not playing games, then I really don't know what causes this, but it does happen.

I had exactly this situation back in January with one of my young ladies, aged 10. One minute she was reading and playing her grade one pieces beautifully, the next she had developed a note 'blindness'. She couldn't even play other pieces she knew very well. Naming notes (in games, flashcards etc.) was a nightmare.

On speaking to mum, she assured me that daughter had been practising and I could see that she'd completed note naming exercises I'd given her between lessons. However, she'd done these by counting the lines and spaces to work out the letter names. Before, she could name a note just by looking at it.

I decided to have a gentle chat with her to find out if maybe she was not enjoying her lessons. She then told me she was under a lot of pressure due to this year being her year for taking the eleven-plus exam. Mum has set aside three evenings a week (is this excessive? I don't know not having children of my own) just for eleven-plus work, and she also was pushing daughter to go for her grade one exam, not to mention tuition in French, tennis and ballet! In the end, I said to her that we could leave grade one until after her eleven-plus, with the agreement that she takes it in the winter session. The look of relief on her face was enormous! Who knows if she was doing this just to get out of taking grade one? Whatever her reasons, (and I've no cause to doubt her having taught her for nearly two years), I believe this note blindness was genuine. She can play and read music as well as ever now.

At five years old, your student may be having a joke with you, but perhaps there are exterior reasons for her naming notes wrongly? Just a thought..

*I like miffy's suggestion though! *

Hehe..I have naughty pupils. But 2 can play at that game

Regarding sudden 'loss' of knowledge - it's not usually gone, it's just that they are using that bit of brain for something else new at the moment. It'll come back when they realise where they've stored it..
On the violin, it doesn't matter how wonderfully straight their bow is, as soon as they do something new with the left hand, bow goes squiffy. But it comes back because it was there originally.
So in general it's not a problem and the more naturally you let it come back in it's own time, the better all round, rather than stressing them with too much information. If they are generally playing the right notes it doesn't always matter how they got them. We end up using all sorts of methods, learning to use the one that is the most convenient at the time.

She may be bored, but she could also just be having a bit of fun, as the others have pointed out. Currently I have a 4 1/2 year old, who without prompting from me, will start playing chopsticks (black note version) but deliberating mixing the groups of 2 and 3 black notes up. She normally starts this whilst I am writing up some notes. She is not disruptive. I just laugh. As long as you don't lose control of the lesson, I think a bit of levity helps with rapport.

I sometimes see this kind of temporary blankness about things. I've mostly seen it in the little ones - up to about 8. I wonder if it's when they've had a lot on at school. I've also wondered if they have a growing spurt and they just haven't got the energy left for their brains!! It usually comes back after no more than a week or two. It can be very disconcerting though to find that all that stuff you thought you'd crammed into them had just drained away!

However, as you say she names every note but the correct one it may just be a little test of the teacher. Kids love to find a boundary and give it a little shove to see what you will do.

Sounds like she may be playing games - as mentioned above, the best way to find out is to agree when she says the wrong note and quickly move on to the next one - if she's anything like mine she will take great delight in correcting you!

Also worth asking parents what else she's got on - there's an awful lot of new stuff to take in at school at the age of 5. Is she doing any other instruments? Mine is a little older at 7, but with piano, bassoon and 2 different recorders she will happily read and play the right notes on whatever instrument she is practising but is having a 'confused phase' when it comes to naming them - I know it's in there somewhere though!

I agree, guessing is a terrible lazy habit. Some children are extremely good at reading your reaction when they guess, I've got one little one who will look intently at my face while she starts to give her (guessed) answer then alters it like lightening if she sees a 'no' expression starting to appear on my face. She's much better at this game than I am so now I tell her that in order to stop her guessing I'm going to turn my face away when I ask a question. Others will play a note then swing round quickly to look at you to see if it's the right one. If they do this I move back so I'm more or less sitting behind them !

I don't have any answers to this, but I have come across infant-school pupils who seem to temporarily "lose" the ability to read words as well. They don't seem to be acting-up, or to have any control over it. It's almost as if they have just filed that piece of information away for a while. Perhaps it's something some brains do to protect some aspect of learning while it works on something else, as the memory always comes back intact at a later date.

Oh, I get that one SO often! I tell them if they keep looking at mer they'll turn into stone. Then one time they turn round and I'm wearing my "turn you into stone" face! (and growling)

The typical conversation is "A?"
no
"B?"
"and you're going to go through the alphabet until I say Well Done, are you? It's not going to happen"

Or in the case of questions with only two possible answers, as soon as one is obviously wrong, they change it swiftly. I either remain stony-faced until they have to decide which of their answers they meant, or sometimes give such an effusive "well done!!!!!!" to the second answer that they realise I'm being sarcastic

My response to guessing and going through the alphabet is:

"bland, interested face - giving nothing away*
"so, what's your final answer?"

My guess is she knows what the notes are well enough and is just trying to make it more interesting.

Why not give her a sticker if she answers them all correctly, you could tell her before you start how many she needs for a sticker or just keep it open. alternatively put the game aside for now and test the same skill in a different way.

I went looking for this thread again because of an experience I had this week with a bright just seven year old. I mention it because it goes to show how misunderstood we can be. I was carefully explaining about steps and skips on the keyboard - lots of practical stuff playing notes next to each other and skipping others. I finally focussed on skipping from C to E as that was the skip in his piece (Piano Adventures Primer). Then we got to looking at skips and steps in the music.

Then little boy tried to play the piece. He read the music carefully and played the piece leaving out all the D's. When I asked him why he had not played the D's he said "Oh, I thought I was supposed to skip them."

Back to the drawing board!

If there's one thing I've learned from teaching, it's NEVER ASSUME YOUR STUDENT/PUPIL KNOWS/UNDERSTANDS/CAN DO something. It's very, very easy to make assumptions that a student has understood something but it's only by asking open-ended questions, and by providing certain activities, that you will know for sure whether this understanding is really there or not (viz. the thread on teaching the melodic minor ).

Yes, one wonders if they must think we do these things just to make life complicated - like, why would we write them? I had a similar experience once after having taught - I thought - carefully what a tie showed you you had to do, only to have one little girl come back thye next week and carefully lift her hand off the second of the tied notes. "You said I wasn't meant to play that one" she said. So she trustingly assumed we musicians must have some very good reason for carefuly writing these notes we don't want them to play.

(It sometimes takes a while to get them to understand why some exam books have printed whole bars which they don't want anyone to play - and they have this little box over the top with a figure 1 in it)

Yeah, I have one of those "little ones" (12 yrs), too. And she is a genious when it comes to it. The thing is, I am better. And actually I seem to be the only one who has realized yet, what she is doing. Because she is doing it, when reading, too. That's why now the parents say she is dyslectic - but she isn't. Just very clever.

She doesn't know how to learn. That's one aspect. I am not sure, if she wants to learn. She certainly wants to play all the pretty pieces. So, what she did before she got me, about two months ago, she obviously guessed have of the time, or took ages to sort through the notes on the paper, writing the name of the note above it. Then, she would memorize the whole piece in almost no time - and then appears to "read" from the paper, while in fact playing from memory. It's a profoundly astounding brain performance, but not the required task of reading a piece. Problem is, I only see her every two weeks which means, I cannot influence her or work out a way to study properly, to read the music. Which means, she first needs to work on getting the names with the notes right. I started on flashcards last time. I hope they put them into use, which I will know on Friday. Hope never ceases!

Some kids start to realise at school that knowing the answers is distinctly Not Cool and they develop an ingrained habit of pretending not to know things. I'm afraid I've done that even at university because people got annoyed that I remembered things easily where they struggled. It's pure luck, my brain takes in information really easily and I lacked skills that they took for granted, but I knew that it wasn't smart for me to admit to everything I knew. If she's a particularly smart pupil it might be a bit of that?

My 5 year old daughter does also like to play this game, however. When she is doing reading she will start giving silly answers to words I know she knows. I tell her firmly that I know she's putting it on and we'll not do the game any more. We come back to it after doing something else. The "reward" of getting to mess you about is removed for the time being.