What Age to Start Piano Lessons for Kids?
What age should kids start piano lessons?
What are the benefits of learning piano at a young age?
What can I, as a parent, do to make sure my kid grows up with a musical education?
Our job as teachers is to teach your child the skills required to play the piano, but also to foster a love of music that will keep them interested and pursuing music long after they stop taking lessons. This post covers common requirements for kids starting to take piano lessons, the benefits of piano lessons for kids, and how we structure piano lessons to most effectively teach your child.
Whether you’re looking for piano lessons near Watertown, Cambridge, or elsewhere in the Greater Boston area, be sure to turn to us!
When to start piano lessons for kids?
In our experience, we’ve found that a good average age to start piano lessons for kids is at around five years old, give or take. Although cultivating a sensitivity to music can begin as soon as babies are born, playing the piano requires a few abilities that need a little growing!
If you’d like to get your child exposed to music at an earlier age, we recommend checking out some music schools for toddlers in the Boston area!
Hand Size:
If your child can put their five fingers on five white keys comfortably, then they are ready to play!
Dexterity:
If they can wiggle each finger somewhat independently, then their hands are dexterous enough to start training. If they still struggle with it, it’s best to wait.
Reading/Counting Ability:
Learning to play the piano requires learning to read sheet music. If your child is still struggling with their letters and numbers, it’s best to wait a little bit until it is easier for them. Otherwise, it’s just another hurdle that may frustrate them and likely cause disinterest.
This brings me to the most important requirement:
DESIRE TO LEARN:
Learning an instrument is a lifelong pursuit that never ends, for there is always a new technique to learn, a new piece to master, or a new style to own. Therefore, piano lessons for kids should happen when the child is ready and willing to accept this new information. There are several benefits of playing piano as a child, including being able to relate to others, find them a place in a community of other musicians, and develop their interpersonal skills, all of which are incredibly useful and necessary.
Musical education is like a seed – it takes time and effort to grow, especially at the beginning. If a child is forced to do things that they find boring, or if they have a teacher that challenges too much too early, leading to feelings of inadequacy, or if the parent tries too hard to get the kid to practice, then the child will associate piano with frustration, sadness, and unpleasantness, rather than the joy that music is supposed to bring. Though it takes a lot of discipline to learn an instrument, the benefits of starting piano as a child means that there is plenty of time to learn, and so especially at the beginning, we find that it is more important to emphasize the fun of playing and listening to music than it is to try and force the students to learn technique (something they will learn anyway, in time).
I find that gamifying and learning through osmosis are the most effective methods to try and teach young children music. In our private piano lessons, we listen to music while clapping along to teach that music has rhythm that repeats, so the child starts to unconsciously feel that rhythm and those repeats when listening to music outside of lessons. We play the notes game, where we get the student to find every E on the keyboard, and add complexity (can you play it with a specific finger? Can you find the highest? The lowest? What about with the other hand?) as they learn. This gets them to be familiar with the keyboard while keeping it fun!
There are many methods like this to keep kids from getting frustrated and bored, but as music teachers, it is our job to ensure that they are progressing, and that they learn something new in every piano lesson they take at our music school near Watertown. As they age, we build upon the foundation that we have created to be able to play more and more difficult pieces, or songs, and provide a constant feeling of improvement that builds their self-confidence, their ability to express themselves in a healthy way, and teaches them a skill that they carry with them for the rest of their lives.
My parents were careful to ensure that I was willing to take lessons before starting them. Piano lessons always felt like something I wanted to do, something I was working for, and something that was for me to enjoy. Now, as an adult, my love for music, and my desire to keep getting better at it is something no one can take away from me. I’m glad that my parents were gentle with me from the beginning, as I know many people (even talented ones) whose parents forced them to play music and now have nothing but bad associations with it. The moral of all this is that inspiration and enjoyment is a greater motivator than forceful discipline, and is something we value heavily in our teaching.
Exceptions:
We’ve all seen the four-year old playing Mozart already, so if your child can do all the things we’ve mentioned above before five, then there is no reason to wait! Enroll your child in a trial lesson today.
Some kids take a little more time to develop these skills, and forcing them to play piano without a strong desire to learn can kill the seed of music before it even gets a chance to grow. If your child is reluctant to start playing, or you’ve tried piano lessons, but they don’t seem to take, then it would be good to wait. There are plenty of people who started playing at eight years old instead of five, who, because of their improved abilities at reading and dexterity due to being older, learn faster than they would have at five and have no problems becoming very good musicians. The best age for kids to start piano lessons is when they feel ready and want to learn piano.
Though it is somewhat true that the younger you start, the better you can become at musical instruments, it is more important to foster the love of music, as that will lead your child to want to improve their skills and make their instruction that much more effective.
Benefits of Learning Piano at a Young Age:
Music studies show that learning music can help children develop useful skills in important parts of the brain. From a young age, before they can even speak, playing music around your child and encouraging them to dance helps develop motor skills, listening skills, self-expression, a sensitivity to rhythm and beat, and the mind-body connection.
Once they are old enough to learn an instrument, playing piano helps develop fine-motor skills, reading, hand-eye coordination, and executive functioning, all at the same time! This power-packed punch of needing all their skills and attention at once to do the complicated task of playing music, all while being enjoyable, means that a lot of the brain is active at once, and when the brain is active, it’s developing.
HOW TO STRUCTURE PIANO LESSONS FOR KIDS:
Especially at such a young age, keeping your child interested in learning music is a must. Therefore, we like to start with the music your child already knows and likes to listen to. Do they like the new Disney/Pixar movie? Let’s learn a song from there. Into pop music? Start with Alicia Keys. Rock? The Beatles are a timeless choice. This way, there are real, tangible goals to work toward, which helps create a sense of progress.
The first few months of lessons are used to learn how to sit correctly (check out this adorable and informative video about proper posture at the piano), the basics of the keyboard layout (pictured below), rhythm, and pitch, and the idea that notes get higher as you go right, and lower as you go left on the keyboard (pictured below). For a more in depth explanation of these basics, look at our previous post on how to start learning the piano.
The most important takeaway from this video is that it is important that your child’s whole body is working together to be positioned correctly to keep the hands as light and free as possible to do their very fine motor skills. This includes having an adjustable bench, some boxes/big books for them to put their feet on and making sure that neither their elbows nor their wrists are lower than the level of the keys on the keyboard.
As you can see, the keyboard is arranged in a pattern of alternating black keys and white keys. The white keys are named A through G and then repeat. A sharp (#) means going up, and a flat (b) means going down, so the black key to the right of C is C#, and the black key to the left of A is Ab.
For the first few lessons, we try and get a read on your child’s current abilities in dexterity and reading/counting, and their favorite genres of music.
After the first couple weeks, we begin to start learning piano notes (mostly just the white keys, sharps and flats will come with time) the repetitive design of the keyboard, and different rhythms (6/8 and 4/4, the most common ones, to be specific) through games and listening to their favorite songs. We start to learn our sheet music with just a couple lines of the five we eventually work towards.
After two months or so, we start to learn our first songs by using the book Johnson’s Teaching Little Fingers to Play to start seeing music the way it is written in real life. We like this book because it has a very good progression to improve your child’s ability to play, it has songs that are familiar to all of us, and friendly, colorful pictures that keep your child interested.
The best age to start piano lessons is around five years old, and at that age, reading sheet music can be very overwhelming. Although it looks simple, it relays a lot of information at once – pitch and duration of the note, volume at which to play it at, speed, etc. – so we like to make it simpler by teaching reading music with games, and only one line at a time. We start with one of the five lines that sheet music is written on, and add lines as understanding grows, until your child is reading music like a professional musician in no time.
The methods mentioned above are general guidelines on how to structure piano lessons for kids, and fairly consistent among our students, but we make sure that our instruction is useful and catered to your child’s needs. Every child is different, and especially at the beginning, what our piano teachers focus on is fostering the seed of love for music – lessons are only half an hour a week, and most of the learning happens when they practice throughout the week. If we can keep that love going, the child will be much more likely to want to practice, and will keep getting better on their own, even after lessons end when they get older.
Sign up your child for Kids piano Lessons near Watertown, MA!
Although it is agreed that the age at which kids should start piano lessons is around five years old, each child is different, so a better gauge to tell if they are ready is whether they have the hand size, dexterity, reading ability, and desire to play. By gamifying the learning process, and constantly tying back the skills we are learning to the music they already love, we focus on keeping your child interested in playing the piano.
As teachers, it is our job to teach your child skills, but more importantly, it is to foster the love of music until it takes off without us. Learning music is a lifelong process, and growing that seed gently right from the beginning will lead to your child having a connection to music that they will want to strengthen on their own. There is really nothing like the ability to take the sounds you hear in your head and playing them on an instrument as versatile as the piano, and the joy that this ability to express yourself brings.
Bring the magic of music into your child’s life by enrolling them in piano classes near Watertown at Boston Piano Lessons.
FAQ About Best Piano Lesson Age:
What’s the best age to start piano lessons?
At Boston Piano Lessons, we believe five years old is the perfect age to start piano lessons.
Can a four-year-old take piano lessons?
While we recommend children start piano lessons at five, some children are naturally very gifted and show passion and capability earlier. It is possible for a four-year-old to take lessons if they meet the recommended criteria.
What requirements should a child meet before starting piano lessons?
Children should be able to place their five fingers on five white piano keys comfortably, have the dexterity to wiggle their fingers independently, be able to read a little, and have a desire to learn.
What are the benefits of learning piano at a young age?
Playing piano helps develop fine-motor skills, reading, hand-eye coordination, and executive functioning all at the same time!