Customer Reviews

Piano for Preschoolers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased this program for my 4 year old daughter after researching several programs/books that claim to be the best for introducing piano to young ones. I also checked with a friend of mine who majored in music and teaches piano; and she said this was a good system to start with because it teaches sight reading from the very begining versus trying to undue bad habits later. The child plays the notes by looking at the colors on the grand staff, and then playing those colors on the piano/keyboard. My daughter learned which notes were higher on the keyboard versus lower in just 2 lessons. She plays the songs in the book everyday and doesn't even know that she's learning to recognize notes. Also, the author is great at answering emails. I had a question regarding what to do next with my daughter since I started with her system, and she answered me with a very detailed and thoughtful email. I highly recommend this program if you would like to introduce your preschooler to the piano in a fun and rewarding way. My 2 1/2 year old, who is getting really good with colors, can also play Twinkle Little Star with my help(eye hand coordination is a work in progress, but this a great way to work on that!). With free shipping and money back guarantee, you can't go wrong. Try it!

After reading the more positive reviews here, I decided to plunk down the forty bucks on this package.

I have taught music (on the fiddle) some in the past, and I've even prepared some musical tutorial material before. I was also a moderately accomplished pianist "back in the day" (you'll never see me play piano on YouTube). In my opinion, this is not worth forty bucks. It's not even worth ten bucks.

The only interesting innovation--and it actually isn't an innovation--is that the notes are colored and you get some colored keyboard strips that you put above the piano keys. So you can say, "Play green" and your child will know what you mean.

You get 17 tunes in the book--that's not very many. They are not arranged according to difficulty; it starts out with "Twinkle Twinkle" which is decidedly not the easiest tune to start with. The "Song Book" is very plain. Tunes are printed one tune every other page (every other page is blank).

The biggest failing of this package, however, is the complete lack of any useful guidance to the teacher in the "Parent/Teacher Guide." I can imagine that you might be able to get a small child interested in the piano by teaching him or her how to play 17 tunes. But the meat of the program will lie in the techniques to get the child to understand what's going on, to pay attention, to care about things like hand position--all the little problems that have to be solved in helping a child to learn an instrument. These things are covered in completely useless generalities and in an almost completely unsystematic way.

Let me put it this way. If you buy this package looking to get something simpler and gentler than "Teaching Little Fingers to Play" by John Thompson, you will be sorely disappointed.

My advice to the vendor (I say "vendor" because the author is not named in any of the materials) is to go back to the drawing board and release another, greatly improved version. At the very least, scan in some pages of the package and put them on Amazon to let people see what sort of thing they're getting.

My 3 year old son quickly picked up on the colored notes method. He loves that the book contains simple songs that he already knows the words to. After just a few weeks, he now sits down by himself and plays. Sometimes I even hear him singing along as he plays.

Nice & simple teaching tool. However, it would be more helpful to have the corresponding letter on the notes in the book & the keyboard strip. My 3 & 4 year old know their alphabet already. I was disappointed to find that the keyboard strip does not sit nicely on the piano as it seems in the pictures. I don't want to use tape to do so in order to avoid any damage to my very expensive baby grand piano.

Overall, good product for the very basic learner...now all I need to do is keep my child seated during piano lessons without having the distraction of siblings.

I bought this product for my 3year old daughter and she loves it! We are not doing structural teaching, I am just letting her play on her own and she already has a good hand position and almost plays the first song by memory. I am very happy with this product and I recommend it to anyone 100%.

This book fails to present any original ideas. The color-coded system is neat--and maybe even effective--but not if dealing with a child with synesthesia (fairly common in musicians and often expressed by experiencing musical tones as colors). The chart says that C is green, but your kid insists that C is orange. Oh well. One wonders why just having stickers with the names of notes might not be just as--or even more--effective.

But worse is the rearranging of melodies. Yankee Doodle is annoyingly muddled by changing a crucial half-step up to a minor third (jumping from A to C instead of Bb). Sorry, but this just doesn't work.

Overall production quality is low. Little, if any, significant information is provided in the teacher's book. My copy of the recording is flawed, skipping terribly. The woman counting fails to sing her counting convincingly, making keeping track of the melody difficult. My three-and-a-half-year-old son pleads with me to turn her off as soon as the CD fires up.

My advice is to look elsewhere for something that can inspire young pianists.

My fiances' six year old son has been using the system for three weeks now. He took off with the book the first week and ran through the lessons. He's working on getting the music tighter, which is awesome. We are planning a piano recital for the beginning of next month. The best part, he's excited about playing the piano. He plays the piano more than video games which is such a relief.

I recommend this product to any parent that wants their child to play piano. It has peaked this childs interest and kept him coming back for more.