Piano Lessons for Home School Students

If you home school your child, I'm sure you have spent time looking for ways to build their curriculum for the semester. Many parents look for ways to keep their children enthused and excited about their schoolwork, including language, art, or piano lessons, to keep their children involved with people outside their home.

I've recently become familiar with a program called Simply Music, designed to simplify the process of learning to play the piano. Simply Music has managed to set a higher bar when it comes to benchmarks of what to expect with music education. The program approaches playing from an entirely different perspective than what one typically thinks of with piano lessons. With this remarkable method, students are able to learn to play before they actually learn to read music. Even beginning students can quickly play pop, blues, classical, and accompaniment pieces. With a year of lessons, most students wind up with around forty songs they can practically play from memory.

If your child is like the children I come in contact with, seeing instant results from hard work is the necessary motivation to success. Understanding how the songs work together builds the excitement needed to allow children to want to practice and stay with the program, rather than experiencing the typical burnout with traditional lessons. Burnout results when students become frustrated with their lack of progress-having to learn to read music first then play the piano later can be slow and tedious. Unfortunately, far too many students never succeed in acquiring the ability to play. In fact, many end up losing their desire altogether and quit. Home school can become a drudgery, but piano lessons that create real and instant results keep the children involved.

Unlike traditional piano lessons, Simply Music lessons often happen in groups, creating a classroom like environment. Taking lessons with friends or other students creates a level of accountability that encourages the children to continually practice.

Why try to teach your child the traditional method? Making students learn to read music before they can play is like making them learn to spell before they are allowed to talk. Building their musical vocabulary from an early age is a wonderful way to introduce and maintain skills that will lead to a lifetime of piano enjoyment. Reading music is a necessary part to learning piano, and it is built into the program; however, that is learned in later lessons. Simply music temporarily delays the reading experience, and starts students off by teaching various musical approaches directly on the keyboard.