Preparatory A (from 2+). Lesson 44

How was your practice last week? Did you enjoy finding Tonic, Subdominant and Dominant chords in Introductory Songs and on the piano keys?  Was your toddler interested to play the chords too? I hope, you shared your experience in our Soft Mozart community!

In our Pedagogy Class today we are going to talk about the important steps of building both hands coordination with my method.

As we already learned before, every sound has a beginning, a development, and an end. This process can be shorter or longer depending on the length of the sound. For beginners, training attention to learn to recognize this information presents an additional challenge.

Animation in the Gentle Piano Module helps the student’s eyes to see when to press, hold, and release the sound.

    
The beginning of a sound is represented by the flower bud. The end is presented with the animated butterfly.

 By playing notes with separate hands, the student starts paying more attention to rhythmic cues faster.  By learning to quickly shift his visual focus from notes to keys, he can switch his attention to read additional information.  Thus, attention starts to see when the student should hold (sound signal from Mr. Oops), release (butterfly) and replace (spider) the key.

The next step in hand coordination development is playing with both hands when one hand holds the note (blossoming flower) and the other one switches the keys (butterflies).  If a beginner is unable to perform this task, it means that his attention is not yet ready to coordinate both hands.  In this case, he should continue working on improving the timer reading and wait for his attention to be able to complete this task.

On this video at 1:06-1:16, little Titus is not controlling the movement of his left hand yet and spontaneously press it with the right one.  At 1:26 – 1:28 Titus gradually gain control over his movements and learn to press piano keys in one hand while changing them in another.

You have to watch carefully the timer and wait, when child's attention will be able to comprehend this task.

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