Find Guitar Lessons | Teaching Lessons for Preschool Kids
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But for them to come in and take a guitar lesson, it’s different because they’re the only kid in the room. And so they might feel a little uncomfortable at first. For people looking to find guitar lessons, I like to make the first lesson really fun, like they’re having a good time. So I bring out the guitar puzzle and then we go decorate the guitar. And so what I mean by that is we’ll just put little fluff balls, red red balls in between the two block notes and then we’ll put little blue sticks across the three block notes. And so literally, they can see the big difference between the two black notes in the three black notes. And then I might just say, hey, can you play the two black notes on the guitar and then do the same thing with the threes?
We also might talk about the low notes on the guitar and the high notes on the guitar. There’s a difference. We might talk about louds and softs and things like that. Another thing that we talk about again, like just doing that at the guitar, they’re ready to change. They’re ready to do something on the carpet again. So we come back to the carpet. We might talk about finger numbers, finger one, finger two, finger three, finger four. And the cool thing about the curriculum that we use at Curtis Music Academy is we use a book that focuses on teaching that age group and it has a guitar lesson book, CD at the end of the book.
And so the kids have a lot of fun with the really goofy, silly songs as well. And so there’s a finger, no songs that usually kids love to play. So again, when you’re looking to find guitar lessons, you might be ready for that point. Lessons might be getting close to being done. I have a lot of students at that age, they just take 15 minutes to find guitar lessons, which is perfect because they’re just three years old. And 15 minutes is plenty of time to learn something new at the guitar. And some students have taken 30 minute guitar lessons. So if it’s continuing to go on, I might go back to the guitar. Is this really a great lesson in that same book about repeating patterns? And so it’s called The Monster Bus Driver. And so the accompanying song is very goofy and very silly, but basically it’s learning how to hear a pattern and then play it.
And the kids just usually are rolling and giggling and laughing and they play and they just repeat what they’re hearing. So that is a really fun speech as well. So that’s really kind of what the first guitar lesson looks like, if in doubt. I use some coloring at the end, just it might just be something like we’re going to color a quarter note. And again, I have to learn these things myself that many times in this age group, they’re not really confident holding a colored pencil or a crayon because they’re so young. They haven’t had they haven’t had to they haven’t been to preschool yet. And so that’s fine. And if it ends up just being them coloring on a piece of paper in my book, that’s OK, because they’re having a good time.
They’re getting comfortable with how to find guitar lessons. So another really good thing is getting the parents on board and just letting them know the expectations, letting them know we’re just here to have fun and they can learn and grow slowly. Because the most important thing is for me that when they’re seven or eight, they’re just going to be fired up about the guitar. So I don’t want to wear them out and have them not enjoying guitar lessons. But I want them to be really prepared for a whole lifetime of enjoying music and enjoying learning in general. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
So it might just be a one minute guitar lesson and I might demonstrate on the guitar what it would sound like before they play it as well so that they can kind of hear it as well. And the other thing, too, is when someone’s first learning the metronome, I might just do two measures with them of quarter notes for them to really get it, because after a while, if you keep going for eight measures, 12 measures, it’s easy to get off. So when I’m kind of training someone to hear the metronome, I want them to just be able to conquer just the couple measures at a time. Another thing that the metronome is so good for is because it puts a little bit of positive pressure on you to continue going in music, which helps to find guitar lessons.
So if I have a student who comes in, they’re playing through a song that they’ve worked on throughout the week, sometimes they have to think if the song gets a little challenging in an area, they pause and think about it. Now, that’s actually incorrect. And so you should just be able to play the song from start to finish without any pausing to think about notes or fingering or timing or anything like that. So the metronome reveals all. And so if you’re playing a song with the metronome, it will show you where you pause. It will show you where you sped up. And so it is the great Revealer. And like I said, I haven’t really used the metronome with any songs from the guitar lesson book. We’ve just kind of done it as warm ups.
But I think the more serious you get as a pianist, the more you would want to play with the metronome. I actually saw a YouTube clip that said that that is one of the defining factors between a beginning pianist and an intermediate pianist, is that an intermediate pianist can play with a metronome. And so what you do with a metronome personally at home will cause you when you’re performing or playing in front of others, it will cause you to be so confident and so not shaken by anything that’s happening in the room. You just know exactly what you’re doing and you’re playing with confidence. And that is the goal. And so, yes, it’s harder as a warm up, but it has so much good fruit. So it’s worth it’s worth all of the little kinks and all of the hard things people go through. So thank you for tuning in with my podcast about the metronome. We’ll see you next time discussing more information about where to find guitar lessons.