Warning: Don’t Start Lessons Until You Know This!

By doing a little prep work beforehand, it means that you’ve just saved the cost of several lessons!

Teach Your Child Their Left and Right Side

Teaching your child to mirror actions between both sides of their body will help them develop physical-spatial awareness. This is extremely helpful when learning to play the piano because a lot of young students struggle with telling their left and right side apart. 

Have your child practice jumping to the right or jumping to the left. This will help them physically feel which direction is which, making it easier for them to play with their left hand or right hand. Any activities that involve using the body's left and right sides will help build their physical fluency at the piano and help them become better musicians.

High Sounds Vs Low Sounds

You can do this activity with your child anywhere. Find some animals, birds, nature, etc, and ask them whether the sounds that they make are high in pitch, or low in pitch. This starts them thinking in terms of high sounds (bird sounds or sirens) or low sounds (whales and machinery). 

Say The First 7 Letters of the Musical Alphabet Backwards

If your child knows how to recite A B C D E F G, it will help them learn the notes in piano a lot easier. Being able to recite A B C D E F G forwards is useful, but being able to recite it backwards from G F E D C B A is even better! Being able to do it backwards means that it will save a lot of time in class. When students have to think of which finger plays which letter, it gets very tricky, especially as a beginner. If they already know the first 7 letters backwards, class will be a breeze! This trick will save you the tuition of at least 4 piano lessons.

Count to 5 

A lot of music in the beginning is numbers - from counting 1 2 3 4, or feeling a rhythmic beat physically in their body, to dancing to a beat usually 4 or 8 beats long. If they can count from 1 2 3 4 5 (6 to 10 is a bonus), they are ready for lessons! Finger numbers for piano also go from 1 2 3 4 5. Black keys on the piano are separated into groups of 2 or 3. Recognizing which groups have 2 and which have 3 will help immensely.

Optional But Helpful Things to Have:

Have a Piano Around

Whether it’s an acoustic piano or a keyboard, having a piano around means that the piano is part of everyday life. That means that your child can explore the instrument - how it sounds, what it does when you press a key, what combination of keys sounds good, etc. This will make the piano feel less like a foreign object lying around the house. Piano practice will then naturally become part everyday life and feel less like a chore that needs to be knocked off the To-Do List.

Did You Know…

That learning to play an instrument can also make you better at video games? A study published in the journal Cognitive Science found that children who took music lessons showed faster and more accurate response times in a visual-spatial task, which is similar to the skills needed for playing video games. So, not only can music education enhance your cognitive function and motor skills, but it might also give you an edge in your favourite video games! Win-Win!