Unless your child is already a watchmaker at the age of six, playing the piano is the first time a child really has to come to terms with their hands as tools.
Before this time, what exactly do we expect of children in terms of dexterity? It’s well known that kids are like fawns, barely able to stand in some respects, and remarkably agile in others.
We expect children to hold basic utensils reasonably well, but we are also aware that disaster and poor grasp may occur at any time, so we invent safety items such as the sippy cup.
In no other aspect of childhood except perhaps the piano do we expect a child to learn complex finger patterns and regimens, unless perhaps they are playing cat’s cradle or some other childhood game.
The piano is unique in its demands upon a child’s brain and muscles, and is often the first place they are asked to try again at a task that will end in almost certain failure.
Yet the piano keyboard was designed with the human hand in mind, large or small, and it fits the human anatomy like few other machines, certainly few other 800 year-old machines, especially those sitting in your living room.
Here are the unique mental skills that children are exposed to in a creative course of piano study:
- Persistence
- Balance of work and play
- Left and Right
- Up and Down
- Black and White
- Focus and Confusion
- Awareness of Time
- Planning
- Poise in the face of mistakes
- Cooperation and Engagement
- Use of two brain hemispheres simultaneously
- Formation of mental imagery
- Adaptation to circumstances
- Actions occur in sequence
Here are the unique physical skills children learn from the piano:
- Separation and awareness of fingers
- Coordination of hand and eye
- Increased hand and finger strength
- Balance of hand and body
- Finger pressure required to play both soft and loud
- Separation of hand and wrist
- Counting while performing another physical action simultaneously
Perhaps the greatest skill a child can learn from the piano is that repeated effort pays off.
The trick is to make the piano interesting enough to make the child want to repeat their efforts by themselves.
By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2010 Walden Pond Press All Rights Reserved
See also DEVELOPING CHILDREN'S PIANO FINGER INSTINCTS
See also PIANO FINGER ORGANIZATION GAMES FOR THE VERY YOUNG
See also EXPLORING CHILDREN'S PIANO FINGERING GAMES USING FAMILIAR SONGS
See also AN EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR KIDS LEARNING TO READ MUSIC
See also HOW A CHILD'S AGE AFFECTS PIANO LESSON MOTOR SKILLS
See also WHY CHILDREN SHOULD LEARN ABOUT PIANO CHORDS
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