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Piano Books Require The Right Teacher
Piano books are useless without the right teacher. The manner of the teacher filters the child's experience. For example, I am teaching my grand-niece online via webcam. We started using numbers, and the child is remarkably quick at picking up the physical sense of the keyboard. Then came reading music, which we started after three months of lessons. Reading music exhausted her.
Piano Is Easy
Use Numbers As Relief From Reading
Every time she waned in interest and energy, I steered away from reading music to lessen her exhaustion. You have to sense the student's fatigue, It is easy to tell a child's interest level by the tone of their voice. When reading music, she became subdued and listless.
It's Not The Book, It's How You Use It
The key to her interest was not the music reading book we were using. It was more important to use music reading sparingly. Most piano teachers use only books with notes. They allow no learning of fun pop songs, no letting her choose a Beethoven piece to play, no exploring music that interested her. It was all notes.
Teach Them Piano Is A Fun Machine
She was wide-eyed and incredulous, because she had been carefully taught at first that the piano was a fun machine, not a source of drudgery. She was more than willing to enter into a subject that carried the baggage of drudgery (reading music.)
This was because I carefully controlled how much of this subject she consumed. It is not the actual content that matters to a child, it is the manner in which it is presented. It's not the piano book, it's how you use it.
