With Young Boy Students, One Must Improvise and use Props!

I teach a few young boys piano.  I’ve found that some things definitely work with boys to keep their attention, and this is something that is really key with teaching them an instrument. (No pun intended there….)

I have some card games that I play with all of my students, so I have a small collection of “pieces” used in these games.  Not very fancy assortment, but here they are: A gold rock that I inherited from a student, a couple coins from foreign countries, a blue bead and two buttons, the latter I have no idea their origination.  One has a rollerskate and one has a bird.  What can I say, totally random.

When young boy students start to get antsy and not pay attention, just simply asking them to come back to earth and focus isn’t always effective.  So I bring out the “pieces” and use them to help me regain some of their focus, and consequently use them to teach certain concepts.  For example, I used the gold rock to help my student play the correct notes of a warm-up exercise he was having a hard time playing.  After showing him the exercise many times, and seeing how much he was struggling with a part that required him to play a note, skip the next, play a note and skip another one, I decided to place the rock on each note he was supposed to play, and then moving it to the next one until he could understand the concept of skipping a note and using the correct finger.  

This same student has a real penchant for legos so a couple weeks ago we used his little lego guys to play around and find specific notes.  Anything that boys can grasp onto and physically apply toward learning a tactile concept with the piano seems to really help them, not to mention the entertaining stories we can come up with together to keep it entertaining!