Preschool Piano Camp

Well hello - I am alive and well and am finally jumping back into the blogging world! Last week a piano-teaching colleague and I taught our first ever preschool piano camp. We had so much fun and it was an overall success! Over the next little while I would like to share with you some of the fun games and activities we used to teach these great kids. First, a few things that I learned (or things that I already knew but that got reinforced during this week):

• Preschool-aged children LOVE music - to them it is a magical, wonderful thing. If taught creatively using a fun, hands-on approach, you will be amazed at how smart they are and how much they can really learn at such a young age!

• Young children can pick up on musical concepts before needing the full-out explanation. For example, they can learn to clap eighth and sixteenth notes without necessarily knowing that a sixteenth note gets 1/4 of a count!

• Get out a bunch of fun instruments and a young child will stay busy for a long time - children love exploring different sounds on drums, rhythm instruments, bells, the piano, etc.

• Never take a late flight (especially when you are pregnant and traveling with a 3-year-old) arriving home at 1:00 am on the day that you lose an hour through daylight savings time, the night before you teach a 9:00 piano camp. :)

In planning our curriculum for our camp, my friend and I drew our inspiration from many sources - including some great method books for young beginners, ideas from fellow-bloggers and our own personal teaching experience. Here are some wonderful books that I would highly recommend for young students:

Music for Little Mozarts - I LOVE the story format of this book and the way that the characters of Beethoven Bear and Mozart Mouse are used. We found that the children at our camp LOVED anything in a story format, and that they learned concepts so well when taught this way.

Celebrate Piano - This is a wonderful method book for children. I love that it gets them playing in many different keys/hand positions right from the get-go, and it also emphasizes things like transposition a lot. There are some cute pre-reading songs in this book that we used.

My First Piano Adventures - I recently purchased this book and I love, love, LOVE it! One of its major strengths is that it teaches good, solid piano technique in really fun and creative ways.

Stay tuned for some fun preschool piano activities!