Teaching my Kids Piano and Music
Kids Piano Materials
For the past couple of years I have been teaching my eldest daughter the piano. I thought I would share the three books that I currently am using with her. After searching through quite a few piano resources, I found these to be the best for my style of teaching and my daughter’s style of learning.
From left to right in the photo above, we use the following three books.
1. Faber Piano Adventures Level 1 ( Both Lesson Book and Theory Book )
This is a great series. I tried both Yamaha and Suzuki here in Japan, but my daughter much prefer the Piano Adventures series. She claims she enjoys the songs the best and she also found the songs to be easier to get through which has kept her interest. The CDs are great but they are very hard to come by, but you can easily find other teachers and young players on Youtube playing the songs in all of the Faber books. The CDs are not necessary. In fact, my kids love watching others peform the songs on Youtube. It’s a great source of inspiration for them. My youngest daughter is in the “My First Piano Adventures” series which comes before this by the way.
2. A Dozen A Day Preparatory Book of Technical Exercises
This is a fantastic book and very easy to add to the lesson each week. My daughter learns a two hand finger warm-up or technical exercise from the book. It’s great practice for her and it definitely has been helping her speed and accuracy. The stick figures are fun for the kids and they are easy to work through so it give kids a sense of accomplishment. I have my daughter do one or two exercises a week and she plays them all during warm up periods. She has them memorized too. It’s cool!
3. Scales and Chords are Fun Book
This is a great book, BUT, a bit harder than the other two. I bought this because I wanted my daughter to start right away learning the major scales and basic chords to go along with them. What’s great about this book is that the exercise are fun and you get a song for each scale with chords. She learns the chords in both the left and right hand while she plays melodies using the scales. In fact, she has fun improvising with them already and this ultimately was my goal. Some chords are also a bit of a stretch for her fingers, but this is also good to start stretching early on. My daughter doesn’t feel frustrated at all because the idea behind scales and chords is simple. They sound great to her and this keeps her moving along nicely.
Thus I incorporate all three books once a week for a 45 minute to 1 hour lesson. It’s a breeze once you get the right materials you like teaching and most importantly what your child likes to learn. By no means are these books very everyone, but if you’re on the fence about any of them, then I highly recommend you to give them a try.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me anytime.
What sort of Music Piano Books are you using for your kids? Please comment on any good resources you are using. I’d love to check them out.
Best regards,
Jim Atwood
Nagano City, JAPAN
