Can learning how to play the piano make your children smarter?
There are lots of studies and scholars that have proven that learning to play an instrument, especially the piano, will help your children later in life. With that in mind, I have wanted to teach my kids to play the piano, but I felt it was impossible because I do not know how to read music or play any instrument.
Then, I found Piano For Preschoolers and suddenly teaching my children to play the piano was not out of reach! In this review, I’ll introduce you to this great product to enhance your homeschooling experience!
There are two books that come with the set – a Song Book that your child will play from and a Parent’s Guide that will help you prepare what to say and what to point out to the child. They also have a CD included with the books as a nice supplement. In the center of it all, is the color-coded key strip that gets taped along behind the keys. Each note is given a color and the corresponding color is put on the strip so that your child knows when to play the appropriate notes.
The layout of the Parent’s Guide is very easy to read – no “technical” jargon and lots of white space which helped me not feel overwhelmed. In each lesson, they only focus on one aspect of playing and one song. It makes it so simple for me and for the children. For instance, Lesson One is just to point out where middle C is (which I didn’t know) and that music is made up of sounds called notes. This was so very basic and yet so essential to their learning. Each lesson continues to build on the last lesson so that by the end of the course they will have a very strong solid foundation in piano.
Another thing I really enjoyed about the Parent’s Guide was the continual reminders of what a benefit piano-playing is for a child. At the end of each lesson, they included a quote or a basic truth about the value of learning to play this instrument. For instance, after Lesson Eight … “Early musical training helps develop brain areas involved in language and reasoning. It is thought that brain development continues for many years after birth. Recent studies have clearly indicated that musical training physically develops the part of the left side of the brain known to be involved with processing language.” With each lesson the kids and I completed, I was feeling better and better about taking the time to go through these lessons with them.
Overall, I think this set is a great way to introduce small children to the joys of learning the piano in a way that is fun for them and easy for me.
I have included two pages from the Song Book and several pages from the Parent’ s Guide so that you can see how things work.
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I enjoyed this review. I’m a firm believer that music is essential to a child’s development. And to learn to play an instrument helps one’s self-esteem, confidence, and fine motor skills. Reading music is like learning another language.