At what age should you begin? I think 4 years old is a good age to start. Kids are really starting to pick things up… they’re learning their alphabet and numbers, some are able to tell right from left, and they’re all in school by this age. This past school year (pre-pandemic), I spent one day a week teaching at Meadow Creek Montsssori school here in Barrie, so some of my students were actually as young as 3.5 years old.
This is young. Some of them seem super young. And most kids that age come with a lot of energy.
Excited Energy
Scared Energy
Shy Energy
Super Star Energy
Hyper Energy
To be a good piano teacher, I need to be able to adapt to each child.
Recently I was teaching a shy little girl, which wasn’t something new to me. We’d had a few lessons together and she’d always seemed quietly wary. But one day, this little 5-year-old just seemed overly anxious. She didn’t want to speak at all. Didn’t want to play. Didn’t even want to just listen to a song from a CD. And halfway through the lesson, she looked liked she wanted to cry.
She just seemed so overwhelmed.
Piano lessons aren’t meant to be traumatic.
So, on rare occasions, I have call it a day. In this case, I ended the lesson early. It’s a half hour lesson – so she only got 15 minutes of teaching… or another way of looking at it is that she only missed 15 minutes of teaching.
I really don’t like to do this. One of the things that piano lessons teaches children is commitment. The routine of weekly lessons. The discipline to practice at home. The experience of learning something new.
But in this case… continuing that day’s lesson wasn’t beneficial for the student. In fact, it had the potential of damaging her relationship with music lessons all together.
Just like many of us, kids have good days and bad days. And of course (as almost always seems to be the case), the next week was a different story. The little girl came to class, still shy. Still quiet. But now she was engaged and even interested in her piano lessons; way more than she’d been for the previous two months before.
She wasn’t jumping up and down, but questions were being answered. One-word answers mind you, but still she answered. And when I asked her to play some notes – she did.
Sometimes a child may be overwhelmed by other things… and piano lessons are just one more thing where they feel like they don’t have control. The simple act of letting her out early told this child that she wasn’t being forced into something. She had freedom.
And when she returned the next week – she gave herself the freedom to learn and enjoy it.