Teaching Pre-School Piano in Groups

Introduction: What age should learners start?

The perennial question amongst piano teachers regards the ideal age to start learning the piano. Many will not take on children below age 7, maybe 6 at a push. Some are happy to take younger but will then use the same approach and 1-1 setting that they use with their 7-year old beginners without truly understanding the difference in their needs, and consequently will run into difficulty when their attention span wains.

One reason given for the later start is that teachers want their students to be reading (language) before they begin learning piano, so that they will understand the concept of reading music straight away, and will have the skills to decode and apply this understanding. But by waiting for our students to be readers, are we missing a key phase to develop the multitude of other musical skills that can be nurtured and progressed from birth to age 7?

When they get to us at age 7, having not had any music lessons before, we can often find that they lack a sense of inner pulse, struggle to be rhythmically accurate and fluent, haven’t developed aural awareness with ears that are really listening, don’t understand musical concepts such as pitch, horizontal pitch on the piano and what that looks like on the stave, and finally, haven’t developed the creativity to hear character, moods and feelings in music, much less the vocabulary to describe it. Improvisation and singing, two key aspects of learning an instrument, are very often not nurtured at all, due to self-consciousness that has crept in by this age.

As mentioned above, some are happy to take younger, knowing that this is a key time for their neural pathways and connections to form, and in this regard, we have a big responsibility to ensure those pathways and connections are at their most impactful for further development. There has been a recent surge in pre-school piano methods being made available for this market and these influence how students first experience learning in music. So many of these methods teach in a way that means that students will have to unlearn and unravel the connections they have made when they get to more typical methods.

Here is another solution for teaching this age: teach them in groups, with a curriculum that nurtures everything that is appropriate and essential to nurture in this phase of their development. Musical skills such as:

• Sense of inner pulse
• Rhythmic fluency and basic understanding (by sound then sight)
• Singing
• Creativity – improvisation and exploration
• Listening
• Pattern-spotting
• Musical elements – pitch, tempo, dynamics
• Music-making with others

Why teach pre-schoolers and why in groups?

In groups, you can nurture the above areas through games, movement, improvisation prompts, rhythm and pulse activities, listening to us playing and to tracks, singing nursery rhymes that consolidate learning, and use of pitched percussion.

In a practical sense, you should teach pre-schoolers in groups because when they are ready for more formal settings (whether they be 1-1 or group), you will have capable musicians who are primed for the challenges of learning the piano. They will have their musical skills to underpin their progress when they pursue the more intellectual activity of reading.

If you have been thinking of adding groups, or teaching pre-schoolers (using day-time hours) or indeed both, this is a great place to start. There is very little in the way of start-up costs, you can use the piano you already teach on, so no need for a whole room of keyboards or digital pianos!

A sample lesson:

What should we teach in a pre-school group class? And how should we structure the lesson? Here is a sample of an Autumn lesson plan from our Pre-Notes program, to illustrate what these classes might look like. Within each activity there is progress from one week to the next (each mini-unit lasting three weeks) to ensure this is a progressive curriculum rather than an experience-based one.

This mini-series is based around going on an Autumn walk, including forest animals, leaves falling from trees and finding acorns and conkers. I will describe how each activity can progress depending on the response from each child.

We start the lesson with a hello song, where the teacher sings a line to each student and they respond either by singing back, by tapping a rhythm using claves, or just a simple wave!

We then move onto a warm-up song. This song is designed to warm up hands, fingers, ears, and can often consolidate information such as finger numbers or musical concepts. An example of a generic warm up song is ‘Tommy Thumb’ but for our Autumn Walk topic teachers can play ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ where the students respond on the “pop” by either jumping up, striking a percussion instrument, or playing a note on the piano.

In the first of the three lessons, we will now have a chat about Autumn walks, showing students a picture prompt and asking about their own experiences: what did they see? What did they smell? What did they hear? It is wonderful to get to know our students in these informal discussions that help to engage them and make our classes relevant.

Next we move to the piano and explore the sounds of leaves falling from trees, starting high and floating down to the ground ending on a low note. We can develop technique and understanding of concepts (pitch in this case) and nurture creativity. Across the three lessons this moves onto a hedgehog improvisation (with short and spiky notes) and a falling leaves improvisation (floating notes), both over accompaniments and in Gb major so that they can explore the black keys.

Working on the alphabet and matching letters with a letter board comes next and this is where the concept of the musical alphabet (which we sing) and the visuals of the letters are developed.

We always have a fine motor activity and for this series of lessons, we work with playdough and cocktail sticks/straws to make hedgehogs! Not all of the fine motor activities are quite so messy though and we often give an option!

Working with pitched percussion in rainbow colours (e.g. desk bells, glockenspiels or chime bars) we play an echo song, first of all tapping colour circles and singing, then playing the pitched percussion, and finally playing on the piano. For this lesson our echo song is ‘Cuckoo’ played on G and E. The tapping circles are light blue and yellow, and for each call the teacher sings, “I can make a soft sound, cuckoo”, then children echo the cuckoo using a soft sound. This is followed by a loud sound, fast, slow etc.

Next we have a visual activity where students match the numbers 2 and 3 to the two and three black keys, which they can do both on the owl eyes poster and then on the piano.

Finally we end with some listening. The first aims to develop pulse by shaking scarves, rhythm sticks, circle band etc to a track such as ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and Vivaldi’s ‘Autumn’, followed by a calm lying down song such as ‘Autumn Leaves’ performed by Eva Cassidy and ‘’Tis Autumn’ by Nat King Cole.

As you hopefully agree, having a theme to bring cohesion in activities really helps to structure the class and to keep it engaging and stimulating for our youngest learners! Through these activities we have exposed young learners to many aspects of music learning and piano-prep skills.

Looking for a group piano curriculum to use with your pre-schoolers? Visit www.keynotes-music.com/pre-notes-teachers for information about our Pre-Notes program.