Piano progress

Each Thursday morning Daniel and I are still sitting down to do piano lessons. I have no clue if I am teaching him well, or teaching him properly but I am doing my best and I am happy with how he is going so I guess that can't be a bad thing. 

He is really proud of himself too and loves being able to play new songs, especially ones that he knows. The challenge is having him play by looking at the music, not just by ear once he has learnt the song. The other challenge is for him to do piano practice but I think that will always be a challenge. It's not that he doesn't like practicing, it's that he doesn't think about it and chooses to play games instead.

This week, to try and build up his knowledge of notes and reading the music, instead of playing by ear, I made some flash cards with the notes he has already learnt as well as a treble clef and a base clef to identify which hand to play with. We played games with them, he had to jump onto the different notes when I said them, had to put them in order to play the start of a scale, etc. He seemed to really enjoy this and showed me that he has more knowledge of the notes than I thought because he relies so much on playing by ear. Will see how that goes with using these cards and try and work out how to build upon this idea as he enjoyed being up and moving around too, not just sitting at the piano.

Anyway, here are some videos of his piano playing over the last couple of months.
Mary had a Little Lamb is the first song that Daniel has played using both hands. He has been so excited to used both hands at the same time! This is the first week that he learnt the base for the song.

Here he is playing the same song after a week of practicing it. It does show that practice definitely helps!

Here he is playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which Eliza worked out is also the ABC song.

And we have also started to do the C Scale. He was very happy to learn it the first week. Since then we have been working on making notes flow too as you play them.

So from my perspective I'm happy with how he is going. Will see what we decide to do next year with his piano lessons, if I continue to teach him or if we outsource.