My newest student is 4 years old, and I have given her 5 lessons so far. Usually I don't take on such young children, but her mother is a family friend and begged me. Her last teacher took her for one or two lessons only and said she couldn't teach the child anymore because of her lack of attention span! So I said I would try to take her on, and if she showed interest, I would continue.

So far, most of it has been alright. I try to keep her attention by doing different things. I have my own "modified" version of Grade 1 aural tests that I do with her:

1. Clapping and telling me the number of beats
Instead, I tell HER the number of beats and ask her to clap and try to keep on the beat. She had problems with this but as long as she and I count out loud together she has been improving.

2. Singing
I make her do it just as it is done in Grade 1 as her singing response is very good.

3. Rhythmic difference
I ask her just to tell me WHERE in the passage she heard the difference and try to describe it to me.

4. Discussion of a piece
I ask her just to tell me when it's loud and when it's soft. That's all she can manage at the moment .

Anyway, she loves doing the aural work and she does it enthusiastically, so she is really improving. We also do some drawing if time permits and if she is really not in the mood to play (her mother has her doing altogether too many things in one day - pottery, karate, soccer, swimming, and then piano! No wonder her attention span is limited!) We also do the little worksheets in the John Thompson beginner book.

Now, my problem is this. She is getting the pieces very well, as well as the Dozen a Day Book 1 pieces. I have to go through the notes and rhythms with her before we start a new piece, and she does play all the pieces very slowly, but this is usually normal for beginners that I have taught so far. So I thought she was having no problem reading the notes (she reads them aloud to me all the time) and counting rhythms (she counts them aloud, especially the long notes). When I started doing the worksheets, I realised she had a problem figuring out how to understand which note is which and what rhythm it is.

For example, I told her that middle C looks like a comet, and that's how she remembers it is C. So sometimes when I ask her "how many beats is this note?" (for a semibreve) she often says "C!" This happens not only with C, but with all the notes she has learned so far. Sometimes when I say, "what note is this?" she will say "2 beats!" or something, because that lesson I will have happened to go through all of the beats with her. Has anyone else had this problem? It seems as though she is keen to play and do aural tests and draw, but when it comes to worksheets she doesn't want to focus or listen to me and thus gets the notes and rhythms muddled up. I have also noticed that this is starting to show in her playing, especially when she gets new notes or dotted minims.

Does anyone have any advice? Sorry for the very long post!

I have experienced that with my little sister before. I was teaching her and she would do the same thing you described.
Perhaps you should focus on rhythms away from the stave more, rather than mix notes and rhythms together for now...? Especially with such a young child.
When you say that she's keen to play, maybe you should try a different method. I started using a series called the 'Hal Leonard' series. There are no notes on the staff, as it first focuses mainly on rhythms. The piano is still touched, though... it tells you which fingers and all that to use, allowing the child to have fun and experience rhythms.
(Hope that wasn't too confusing). It then moves onto note reading... and there on.

My, that's a lot of activities for one small child! Maybe she's just confused with all that happening. =P I would be.

I have had children confuse whether you mean note name or note value.
I just rephrase the question.. like I might say, 'What is the letter name?' if they give me note value instead.

I go along with snowflake's suggestion that you try an off stave starter.
I do this on the rare occasions I take on under 7s and it works well.

Yes, Hal Leonard is great for this age group - and also(in my view, even better ), the Piano Adventures primer (purple book). I think it's essential to do some aural work, and not to spend the whole lesson doing music reading. Movement, rhythm games etc etc.. Personally I have an allergy to John Thompson - I don't think it is musically or pedagocically sound. Children who start to learn from this book ( and several others) spend far too long in 'thumbs on Middle C' position, and find huge problems in learning to read efficiently for a long time after.

Leia12

Four is really still very young to be starting out on formal music study and I am guessing that's why your pupil loves the aural and games bit and doesn't think so much about more formal aspects (although she's doing well enough with simple pieces). Like others who have posted on these forums about very young students, I would invite you to stop and think for a moment about a child's development overall.

At 4 years of age most children are not yet in school or only part-time if so. A vast number of them have little or no concept of written language and maths. Most of their experiences to date have been in structured (or not as the case may be) play and plenty of activities (if they've been in nursery or similar) designed to prepare them to learn when they go to school. Visual-spatial reasoning skills are still very much in the early stages of formation quite often, which explains why very young children find working out the different notes quite hard. Sometimes they struggle to see the difference between them.

We all know children who can read at four, count fluently etc but many cannot. We know of children at four who can play quite complicated pieces but there are equally many who won't get a chance to explore more formal music until they are much older but will, nonetheless, "catch up".

I do not have any experience of working with Kodaly or similar methods (hopefully someone who does might come back on this one) but I would have thought developing plenty of singing and rhythmic skills will be as useful to your pupil right now as lots of written work. Would you have wanted lots of written work when you were four?

From what you have written, this sounds like a child being driven by a Mum who is desperate (as, sadly are many today) to show her child is way beyond all other children in her achievement levels. Oh for the days when young children were allowed to be just that - but that's another story!

I reckon if you develop the basic skills for making music with her now, let her play pieces she can manage fairly easily with just a few more stretching demands from time to time, you'll have a reasonable chance of engaging her attention for most of the lesson and moving her on as she gets older. Force the issues now and I think you may have a very reluctant pupil before too long - never mind what her mother wants.

If her mother forces the issue, albeit that she's a friend, you may have to get quite firm on this. Encouraging, stretching gently the right sort of child and you're onto a winner. Push too hard a young child who's not yet ready for same and you are opening a nasty can of worms in my view.

At this age music needs, above all else, to be fun - something to capture the imagination (though setting realistic and sensible challenges is not unreasonable either). You can achieve this too by listening to music and making up stories, drawing pictures to express what you think the music says and so on. It's all valid in developing the senses ready to play.

Good luck whatever.

Hi Leia

In my experience, small children need to go over things about a million times before the concepts sink in. Do not be afraid to go over them over and over again.

It seems to me that this little girl is lucky that her parents found you; clearly you care. I suggest you do what I did as a young teacher - follow your instincts with her.

Make sure this little girl enjoys her lessons and you cannot go wrong.

Steve

I agree totally with what oboist says.

You have to consider child development and how children of this age learn.

They learn experientially, not intellectually, which is why structured play is the norm in general education at this age.

She needs to be playing games and experiencing musical concepts unconsciously through these games. You cannot expect a four year-old to learn through theoretical abstractions and symbols. They are generally only just being introduced to letters of the alphabet and will often get similar letters (eg p, b, d) confused. If a teddy is still a teddy whether it is standing on its head or sitting down, why can't a p be the same as a d??!

It is several years before children can verbalise the difference between letter/word/sentence so it is hardly surprising that she is confused about the difference between note names/values and so on

Ideally, Kodaly and/or Dalcroze training is the sort of musical experience that a child of this age needs. In these lessons, children experience pulse with a large variety of different movements, learn to pitch-match accurately and sing simple melodies unaccompanied, experience rhythm, pitch differences (aurally), dynamic differences and so on. All this is unconscious learning at first, then gradually the concepts are made conscious and then practised and met in new situations.

If you don't know much about child development and how children of different ages learn, please try to find out - or go and volunteer a couple of hours' help in your local school's reception class.

It really is not a case of simply 'going over and over something until it goes in' - yes, that is done but in such a wide variety of games and ways that the child is not aware that someone is trying to ding knowledge into his/her small head!

My advice is to do as Cyrilla suggests. It is so very easy for us adults to 'keep going over things until it sinks in' but we are doing this as a rule from the point of view of OUR understanding of the concept, not from the child's. How on earth can we gauge when a child has understood something? Kodaly I believe is the way.

If you begin with simple songs that use only a couple of pitches so that the child begins to copy sounds and hopefully develop an awareness of high and low sounds and also use this as a way of discovering the idea of pulse, I would think that this would be plenty to be going on with.

Sound before symbol.......in other words don't get into what a crotchet looks like and what it means before they have experienced it through song and games as Cyrilla says.

I have found that children will put their own interpretation on the theories that we give them and often their conclusions will bear little or no relevance to what we intend them to understand.

Practical fun related experience is vital. They are little people and will relate to music on their level, not ours at this stage.

Us teachers would do well do get into what being a child is like to help us learn about their world, not so that they can learn about ours! We need to be taught by them so that we can help prepare them for later.

As for playing, why not use simple improvisation techniques instead of written music? Get the child to do whatever on the keyboard. Explore.....that is what children are so brilliant at. If the child improvises then you can be led by her. It is amazing and how many teachers actually sit back and let a pupil lead? It can be a very humbling experience as well as one that encourages growth and development through freedom of exploration and expression. This will also encourge children to take risks in their music making without fear of 'mistakes'.

Good luck.

P.S Try a Kodaly course!

Thank you EVERYONE for the excellent advice! I will definitely try some of your advice and re-evaluate my teaching method. I wanted to spend a lot of time on the foundation pieces with her, but every lesson she wants to do new things, and refuses to play until she gets to learn something new! So maybe I will take hammerklavier's advice and do some simple improvisation with her. I am sure this will be the kind of thing she will enjoy, because she is very artistic and creative, and she often messes around with the much higher and lower notes that we haven't played while I write in her book.

I never had a hard time reading notes when I learned the piano, because every year in school we learned how to read the notes and play the recorder, so by the time I started playing (I was 9) I already knew mostly everything. However, she is much younger and the type of school she goes to doesn't teach any music. In Bangladesh, the schooling is very... different, and I don't agree with most of their teaching techniques. It does mean her maths is very good, though.

Thank you once again everybody for taking the time to give me this advice! I'm going to print this thread and look over it a few times before I decide my next plan of action!

Make sure you tell us about how you go!

Good - so that's a great opportunity for you to use something she enjoys -
take a tune she can play, or a bit of improvisation, and once she is familiar with the note pattern let her play the same tune in different places on the piano. Ask her which she likes best. Ask her if she can think of a name for her tunes if they don't already have one. At its simplest level you can "spell" words on the piano then play them at varying octaves - one of my young pupils made up a "BAG" song in this way.
Hope some of these ideas from all of us here will open up some new ideas for you and your pupil.

Another thing that you can try is simple composition. Get her to improvise something or compose something and then ask her to invent her own way of writing it down so that you end up with a graphic score. For instance you could ask her to think of a shape, outline, colour, picture or anything similar to represent a particular component of sound. Ask her to draw the sounds that she makes. What might a sustained or long sound look like....? I had a youngster who drew a long arc shape for a long sound and a dot for a short sound! Think about colours too. What colour would the lowest note on the piano look like and what would the highest note look like after they have been heard? Using a visual connection to relate sound is I believe vital. Engage her other senses not just her ears. Maybe don't use the terms 'high' and 'low' just yet. Simply get her to use her imagination to think about sound. (use the pedal too to get extra long sounds!) Consider also how you can have long/loud sounds and long/short sounds and vice versa. There are many possibilities here. Later, as she develops all this will come into her playing when she is learning pieces and thinking about touch and control. If she already has an awareness of 'sound' as a general concept she will probably find it easier to develop musical playing, not just technical.

Another one I use right at the start of piano/music lessons especially with little ones is 'how many different sounds can you make with a piece of paper'?

Give them a sheet of paper and explore all the ways you can make sounds. Scrunching, ripping, flicking it with the finger, folding. droping it to the ground from height, blowing on it, waving it etc etc etc. I had one child who at the begining guessed we could probably only produce four sounds in different ways....she ended up producing 14! Ask them to focus on the quality of sound, volume, length etc and then get them to draw all the sounds randomly with different colours and then put it in front of them and ask them to play their score on the piano.

It's wonderfully simple and inventive and more importantly allows for a lot of unconscious learning to take place as well as it being fun and imaginative plus there are absolutely no mistakes or 'getting it wrong' and therefore no pressure exists for your pupil or you!

Finally, I don't know your situation but have you considered the CT course? It is brilliant and completely worth doing. Ask for Beth in the professional development office at the Associated Board. She is very helpful and will send you a prospectus.

Hammerklavier, what IS the AY-EEN club of which you are chairman and founder member?

We learned "sing clap and play" when I was a youngster - that was age 7 upwards. Very good idea, gets pitch sense good, and also means the child has an idea of the tune and the rhythm before ever touching the instrument.

I'm using this with my 8-year-old beginner at the moment, except we're clapping first, then singing and playing.

*nods* looking backing I always wonder why it was that way round - or maybe we clapped first and it was just that way cos it "sounded good", can't remember to be honest! I found even with my 13 year old flute student, although she will NOT sing, the clapping really helps, and I've also had her and the other student who gave up (terrible instrument to fight with, parents not willing to replace as she plays 3 other things already ) loved doing clapping and indicating the pitch with the height of their hands. It worked really well, they thought it was brilliant, and it really helped!

Suepea, it all went downhill from here!

Thanks Zoda

I luaghed at the tales of teaching these little ones and counting. I recall sitting in my son's ( yes very liberal) dance class where one little Miss kept failing to do the required 16 skips around the room. Brainwave!! When asked to do 2 lots of 8 skips joined together she managed easily. It transpired she couldn't count more than 10

Hi!

Wow I'm so excited to have found this forum!! I went on the internet specifically to try to find suggestions for making learning fun for my 2 5 year old piano pupils and here it is! I had to register immediately!

Thanks everyone for helpful suggestions!

Emily

Welcome to the forums Learner Driver.
Hope you visit often, there is always a good exchange of ideas going on.