May 4, 2011
Kids Piano Practice Tips
One of the best ways to accelerate your child’s progress is to enhance the quality of their piano practice sessions.
For many children, a practice session is composed of simply sitting down at the piano and playing their favourite piece from start to finish as fast as they can.
The secret to getting the most out of each practice session is to have a guiding structure for each session. Just remember, you really should discuss this with your child’s piano teacher to agree upon a structure that’s consistent with their approach to teaching.
To show you how this works, let me share with you the structure I suggest to my students.
ACTIVITY 1: Fun Warm Up
A good way to start a practice session is for children to play their favourite piece for fun. This is mainly just to get their fingers moving and to get the session off to an enjoyable start. You shouldn’t make a big deal of any mistakes made during the warm up.
ACTIVITY 2: Technical Work
Technical work is made up of exercises that help a child develop the coordination and manual dexterity they need to play the piano. When a child is just getting started these exercises often are composed of easy patterns which help youngsters learn to move their fingers.
ACTIVITY 3: Focus Piece/Focus Exercise
Instead of playing all of their pieces, I suggest that at each practice session a student selects one piece to really focus on. As well as concentrating on one piece, I suggest the student concentrate on one special exercise for the chosen piece.
There are a number of different exercises that can be used to be sure that each session is varied and engaging. Here are some of the exercises I use with my students:
Divide and conquer This simply means the student divides the piece up into different sections and concentrates hard on a selected section during each practice session. By practicing and perfecting sub sections of a piece, students progress much quicker than if they try and practice the entire piece each time they play.
Hands Separate Another great exercise is to practice only the left hand or only the right hand of a piece. This is a lot easier than playing hands together and it’s a good way to make sure that the child’s left hand is not neglected.
Vary The Tempo (speed) In this exercise, the child plays the chosen section at a slow manageable tempo in perfect time with a metronome. When they can play the section without an error, they are able to increase the tempo by one notch. If they make a mistake the metronome has to go down a notch. This can often become a little bit like a game of snakes and ladders and is lots of fun.
Alter The Dynamics The dynamics of a piece relate to the way the music changes in volume. It’s an excellent idea to sometimes alter the dynamics of a piece so a student becomes acquainted with how it feels to play loud and soft. You may ask your child to play a piece with different moods eg, Happy or Sad. This helps youngsters learn that there’s more to playing piano than simply pressing the right keys.
Record Your Child Playing It can be a great deal of fun for children to hear a recording of themselves playing. It’s also an excellent idea to keep some recordings so that now and then you and your youngster can sit down and listen to old recordings and appreciate just how far they have progressed.
ACTIVITY 4: Sight Reading
Sight Reading is the facility to pick up a sheet of music you have never seen before and play it just by reading the music.
Sight reading is a skill that children of every age have trouble with. I think that much of this struggle is due to the fact that many students are not really taught the proper way to read music.
Learning the note names and keyboard positions of the piano is not very exciting. It is simply a matter of rote learning — much like learning the times tables or the alphabet.
This is why I developed ‘Piano Is Fun ‘. The idea was to make the learning process fun by breaking it down into easy to manage sections and then providing students with a motivation to progress by rewarding them with colourful rewards, each time they finish a lesson.
When children are just starting to play piano, I advise that each practice session end with a game of Piano Is Fun.
This not only inspires children to concentrate during the practice session, it also acts as a reward and is a good fun way to bring a practice session to a close.
You’ll probably notice that I did not put a time against each of these activities. As you have likely gathered, I don’t like to regiment practice sessions with a stopwatch. I simply tell parents to be sure that each practice session contains the 4 previously mentioned activities.
Lets stop and have a think about this for a moment. Imagine two fictitious children. One named Tim and the other named Melinda.
Every time Tim practices he sits down at the piano and plays his favorite pieces from start to finish for a half hour.
Every time Melinda practices she does the following:
(1) Warms up with an enjoyable piece
(2) Plays some technical finger exercises
(3) Selects a single piece and concentrates on improving a selected aspect of that piece
(4) Finishes off by playing a game that helps her learn how to read music
Which student do you think will progress more quickly? I will tell you from experience that students who practice in a structured way generally progress much quicker than children who practice in a random fashion.
It is very important to remember that different teachers will have different ideas when it comes to how students should practice. The ideas above are some examples of the things I have found helpful over the years with my children.
You may like to print this article out and take it along to discuss with your child’s piano teacher. That way you can ask them how they would like your child to practice at home.
Dr Anthony Fernando PhD, is a musician and software developer living in Melbourne Australia. His piano note software Piano Is Fun has been used by thousands of children and adult beginners around the world to overcome the problem of learning to read music.
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