Information for children who want to
learn to play the piano

I am glad you have decided to take piano lessons, because playing the piano is so much fun. However, it takes a lot of work. You have to practice every day, but it’s not so hard that you can’t do it.

I don’t want you to think that all you have to do is take lessons for a couple of weeks and you’ll be able to play really well. To play really well takes years of lessons and practice. But there’s a lot to learn and it is fun because you are always learning something new. One day you’ll start to learn something and it will be really hard, but in a couple of weeks you’ll be able to do it well. And then there will be something new to learn. That’s part of the fun.

When you begin to play the piano, we have to teach your fingers to do things they haven’t done before. It takes time to train your fingers and to make them strong, so we’ll be doing lots of exercises that strengthen your fingers and hands, and we also will be making sure that your hands stay in the right position to play the piano correctly. If we don’t, you can develop bad hand positions that will make your hands hurt. We need to keep your hands and arms strong and relaxed.

Lots of people who start taking piano lessons don’t want to do exercises—they want to play music. But even the most talented, best piano players do exercises. Many of them play exercises for up to two hours before they begin to practice the music they want to play!

Athletes always warm up their muscles and do exercises before they play in a game. The exercises that pianists do help keep their muscles strong and relaxed. Exercises are very important, but they will be just part of your practicing every day. You will also get to play songs and other compositions that are more fun and interesting than exercises.

Along with learning to play the piano, you will be learning about music. You will learn how to read music, and you will learn to understand all the musical symbols that tell us how to play. You will also learn to use your ears so that you can recognize certain musical sounds when you hear them. This is called ear-training. We will be training your ears! The other part of music that you will be learning is called rhythm. We’ll be clapping rhythms of songs before you actually play them on the piano so that they will be easier to play and you will learn them faster. You might have CDs to listen to that will help you learn the music faster.
Are you ready to start learning to play? I hope so. I’m sure it will be lots and lots of fun.

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