How to Help Your Child Enjoy Piano Lessons

Parents play a crucial role in their children’s piano lessons. By encouraging your child to practice at home, you can help reinforce the teacher’s instructions, keep them motivated and help get the most out of their piano lessons.

Set a Consistent Practice Schedule

Make piano practice part of their daily routine. Children thrive on routine and if piano practice is scheduled they will be more willing and likely to remember to practice. Remember that every child has different learning styles and needs. Some might need more help practising and staying motivated, while others won’t need much support.

Adopt an approach that is consistent with your child’s personality and attitude to learning. If you’re unsure, talk to them to find out what they need. If they want you to be involved, then get involved healthordisease.com andsupport their practice sessions. If you play the piano, you can give them some tips. If not, you can try and work out exercises together.

Create a Good Practice Space

Firstly, make sure you have a good quality instrument that is well-maintained. A cheap keyboard with 61 plastic keys won’t help your child when they are at their lessons playing on an acoustic piano with 88 weighted keys. For an affordable option, consider a good quality digital piano.

The practice space is also very important. Make sure it is well-lit and in a room where you child will actually want to spend time. Will there be a lot of distractions? Will there be people asking your child to stop playing so they can hear the TV? Try to create an environment that supports and encourages piano playing as much as you can.

Make Music Part of Their Life

Listen to piano music in the home and take your child to concerts. If your child is learning classical music, take them to see a professional pianist or symphony orchestra. If they are learning contemporary music, take them to jazz concerts. This helps inspire them and feel like a part of the musical world, as well as being a great family activity.

Provide Incentives and Celebrate Their Accomplishments

While some kids may be highly motivated and can practice on their own, the majority will need someone to push them along in the right direction. It’s hard to know just how much to push them as none of us want to force our child to do something they don’t enjoy. On the other hand, plenty of people wished their parents had pushed them to practice more when they were taking music or other lessons as a child.

If your child finds regular practice a boring chore, try to make it more fun. There are all sorts of great apps for example, that can make learning piano fun. JoyTune’s Piano Maestro for iOS is a colourful and visually stimulating app targeted at kids. Each lesson begins with a little video where an animated character explains the skill they are learning and motivates them with an animated reward system.

Other ways to help them enjoy playing piano is to let them play songs they like and hold performances for the family. If they do well on a test or master a new technique, take them out for dinner or buy them a gift (keep it music related). Encouraging them can also be as simple as telling them you enjoyed hearing them practice.

Encourage them to set goals during their practice, such as playing four bars of a piece without mistakes, rather than enforcing 30 minutes of practice without a particular purpose. Avoid ‘paying’ your child for completing the ‘work’ of practising with something like watching TV or playing video games. You want piano practice to be something they’re motivated to do, not something to be endured for a reward.

Pianoforte offers an extensive selection of new and second hand pianos across three showrooms in Sydney. We also offer expert services including piano tuning, piano moving and piano repair. Contact our friendly team for any questions.