Lesson #5

Suggestions specific to this lesson:
Welcome everyone back from summer and be excited for the 2nd Year: Keyboard Time!

Outline the practice process for this year:
Here at the beginning, practice only needs to take as little as Outline the practice process for this year:We can play a red chord now! Your little piano player should have a red dot on his right hand on the THUMB (finger #1), MIDDLE FINGER (finger #3), and PINKY (finger #5). These are the finger numbers that are used to play the RED chord. Put the RED stickers on your piano at home and match the dots on their fingers with the stickers. They’ll be ready to play Old Paint next week! (See image below for where to place stickers! They should be in your child's bag.)

Celebrate Connection

Here are some ideas to bring playfulness to practice time!

1. Sing Old Paint with a Western accent
2. Kit Kat Keyboard: with the stopwatch on Mom or Dad's phone, time yourself (and Mom or Dad) to see how fast you can play all the C's! Now all the F's!
3. Primary Chords: When you play the red chord this week, sing, "Red" each time your play it. Now try singing red in a different language: French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German...ng Old Paint with a western accent.

Kit Kat Keyboard: With the stopwatch on Mom or Dad's phone, time yourself (and Mom or Dad) to see how fast you can play ALL the C's! Now all the F's!

Primary Chords: When you play the red chord this week, sing, "Red" each time your play it. Now try singing red in a different language: French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German...

Kit Kat Keyboard
Now that we know the black keys ‘sol’ well we are ready to master the white keys! Notice that the grouping of the black keys influences the grouping of the white keys. It is important for them to look closely and frequently at the keyboard in the beginning to reinforce keyboard geography. When they are hunting for those C's and F's refrain from giving too many verbal cues- or talking too much. Just keep singing the key phrases "find a group of 2 down one is C" and "a group of 3 leads to F Yippee!" and saying, "look again" "does that look right?"

C Position Chant
We learned ‘C POSITION’ this week which means our right “Thumb’s on Middle C and a finger for each key!" When we are in ‘C Position’ each finger is assigned to play the note it is sitting on. We will sing this chant A LOT in class! This week we practiced floating our bubble hands over the keys and then letting them land on ‘C Position’. Continue this at home!