A Musical Stumbling Block Turned into a Stepping Stone
Last summer, three sisters joined our music teaching studio. The older two girls, ages 11 and 7, had taken for two years from a teenager, who had quit teaching because she was going to college. The youngest, who was at the time 3½ years old, would be a beginner. The oldest of the girls was already firm in her note reading and timing and was ready to move on in her music. She loves jazzy pieces and does quite well with them. However the 7 year old was not a note reader at all and was developing a real fear of failure. She only wanted to play her old pieces that were in her comfort zone. I asked her if she would like to try playing in the Animal Note books. With a big smile and an enthusiastic yes, we started working on note reading. Each lesson, we worked with the flash cards and the word clues, applying the knowledge to the standard notes on the reverse side of the each note’s flash card. During this time, she enjoyed playing the songs in all of the Animal Note Books. She loved to come to her lessons. I introduced pieces from the new book I am working on where a short song is first written in the Animal Notes and then the same song is written in standard music notation. She had no problem with these, so it was decided to move on to the original book she had used before starting with us.
Whoa, that is a horse of another color. “I can’t do this, there is no way. I don’t know what that note is!!?” I asked her, “What is the note doing, does it have whiskers like a cat, or is it digging like a dog?” “It’s a dog,” she replied with a big smile. Slowly we worked through the song and she conquered it. Each song was, “No, my other teacher decided it was too hard for me!” However, thanks to the word clues and the animal they reminded her of, she could master each new piece. Last week at the music store, I bought a book of five finger popular pieces for her. She looked at the book with, “I love this piece, and this one, and oh, this one is great!!” I let her select the one she wanted to play first. This time there was no hesitation, she note read the piece with joy. Her stumbling block had been turned into a stepping stone, thanks to the Animal Notes and their simple method of introducing music to younger children.
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