I started teaching my oldest boys piano lessons this week. I had come across Jon Schmidt's piano method of teaching a few months ago and wanted to use my kids as guinea pigs to see how they did and decide if I wanted to try teaching new students this method. The claim was that you could learn to play the piano as well as 2 year students in 10 weeks or less. That was a nice selling point for me, so I thought I would give it a try. Well, the note reading method was free, but I did have to buy the digital PDF book of songs for the kids to actually practice the method. If anyone else is interested in learning more about this method you can check it out here @ http://www.jonschmidt.com/.
This is week 2 of lessons and Jakob is reading music from the staff. In traditional methods of piano teaching, kids generally learn by looking at pictures of piano keys and pressing the right numbers on the black keys of the piano. Notice he is on the white keys and using both his right hand and his left hand. Right off, this method teaches students how to read notes from the treble and bass clef by having them memorize "anchor" notes. The traditional way and the way I learned, students don't even see notes on a staff until maybe a month or two at least. He hasn't learned what the value of each note is yet. By that I mean half note, quarter note, 1 beat, 2 beat, etc. He doesn't even necessarily know what the names of the notes are yet. But at this point, he doesn't have to, he just has to memorize his anchor notes on the bass and treble clef (right and left hand) and know where they live on the keyboard and he can learn to read the notes from the staff right from the start. I am totally amazed by this. Most of the songs are songs that they have heard before such as London Bridges, Reville, Itsy Bitsy Spider, etc., but by the 7th lesson they are learning to read sharps and flats which would come traditionally at 18 months to 2 years of lessons. Of course, there are plenty of techniques to practice to improve on playing the piano. But, imagine how much more a kid could accomplish and perhaps want to practice if they could read songs that had sharps and flats in such a short period of time. I'm pretty excited to see how much they can accomplish at the end of the 7 or 8 weeks. I'll have to try and remember to give an update at that time. Of course, I could be having a baby by then, but we'll see. =)
For more great music by Jon Schmidt I recommend checking out The Piano Guys channel on YouTube. They have some truly awesome videos and arrangements.
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