Music with mama: Keyboard 101

A month into our structured home learning music times, and we’re making good progress. We’ve settled into a routine roughly ~5x a week, typically weekday evenings before dinner. Within the Little Musician program, his  favourites remain “solfège” where he can now identify the right sound when he hears it, and sometimes when he sees the notes on the stave (though not always at the right pitch), and “clap-along” when he enjoys moving around to the rhythm (though not always at the defined beats and time values). B regularly asks to repeat these sections, and I’ll oblige until he’s ready to move on. We’re also putting our instruments at home to good use: The DIY and Kindermusik percussion, ukulele and electronic keyboard. I’m quite tempted to get a violin, but may wait till I find a cheap second hand (or convince someone to “gift” it to us)

I’ve since introduced a practical keyboard component by sticking makeshift labels to help B focus on pressing, listening to and singing the individual keys (and chords). This was a natural progression as he was consistently singing do-re-mi when prompted by hearing the note sound or seeing the note on the stave. All I did was buy a pack of basic white label stickers from Popular, colour and label accordingly, stick away and viola! Initially, I only labelled 2 scales (intending to reflect treble and bass) but ever observant B kept pointing out that the rest of the keys were empty, so I had to oblige 🙂

Colour coded keyboard stickers with notes and solfège
Colour coded keyboard stickers with notes and solfège

At the moment, he tends to press one note at a time with his pointy (2nd) finger, using one hand to scale up and the other hand to scale down. Once in a while, he’ll also sing solfège while pressing the correct key. And of course, nothing makes him happier than to randomly bang/dance/sing along. A good start!

Will continue to work on association between what he sees, hears and does (eye, ear, hand coordination), pitch and rhythm. Plan to introduce music-related craft and exercises soon, starting with these:

Hand positioning and fingering
Hand positioning and fingering
Linking solfège, notes and keys

 

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