Music Lessons near me | One Dollar Lessons for Kids
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hi, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy here with a podcast about our one dollar music lessons near me. This is one of the most integral part of Curtis Music Academy. And the whole idea is that a student can come and take a music lesson for one dollar. And that way they can have an idea of if it’s a good fit or if it’s not, there’s no commitment. So people are more likely to just say, oh, yeah, I could come out for a dollar. And usually they’re really fun and we actually have a different set up for the one dollar music lessons near me than our normal setup. So in this podcast, I just want to go through what that would look like, starting with a younger student. So maybe someone, a child who is maybe seven to 10 years old.
And so normally they come in, oftentimes their parents come in with them. We have a nice little comfortable chair for the parents to sit in as well. And on a side note, we always encourage parents to stay in the room with their children. Usually parents just get a kick out of music lessons. They like to just see what their kids are learning. And we always think it’s better that the parents are involved in the music lessons, too. So it’s just a good time. So we always encourage parents to come in. And first of all, I’ll just start asking the students a little bit about themselves, what their favorite class is in school, what they like to do.
And I just make a little bit of small talk with them so that they feel comfortable and they feel like they belong and they’re at home. So we want the kids to have fun, especially on the first music lesson. And that is really important, especially to me that they are having fun. And so usually I champak the one dollar music lessons near me with a lot of fun because it sets a precedent that each piano or guitar lesson and playing the piano is fun. And so they’ll always associate that with the fun feelings that they have in the first one dollar music lesson. So we just talk for a little bit at the beginning and after we make some conversation at that point, I’ll ask them, do you have any experience with the piano?
And usually I know before going in, if they’ve had experience, some students have been looking for music lessons near me for about a year or some have played here and there, or some students might have picked out a few little songs on the piano. And at that point, I always like to give them the opportunity to play any songs that they know, whether it’s Mary Had A Little Lamb or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or anything of that nature. And so I always just give them the opportunity. And I say, if you don’t have anything to play, that’s fine, too. I just like to give you an opportunity if you would like to play something. So we go through that, we play. And at that point we just kind of start off with our music lesson.
So I always start off with the finger numbers. And so I say thumbs or one, and then I point two fingers to the pointer fingers. Fingers two, three, four and five in the pinky fingers are five. And so this is really critical because normally in Western learning at school, we start with the pointer finger as one, but in the piano we actually start with thumbs or one. And so that’s a big deal. So I actually reinforce that pretty much all throughout the beginning book. So for several months we might just review it, you know, verbally once a music lesson. OK, so show me finger one, show me finger to show me finger three and onward like that, but especially right at the beginning.
And the reason why that’s important is because it sets you up for success, the whole book. And so throughout the whole book it will say hints at the beginning of the song like Finger two goes on this note. And so students who are really confident in their finger numbers can just confidently put their right hand finger, too, on a certain note. So I think it’s really important to just really start off there. And I even have these printouts of handprints. So I have a left hand print and a right hand print. And depending on the age of the student, I might really go over that to my younger students looking for music lessons near me.
I spent a lot of time there. We have two hands. This is the left hand, this is the right hand. And the more I teach the piano, the more I’m realizing it’s really important at the beginning to distinguish between the left hand and the right hand. So we play a lot of games with that, too. And the thing is, the students are learning even when they don’t realize they’re learning, they think they’re playing a game. They think they’re involved in answering the questions. Right. And having fun, but they’re actually learning. And so the student will raise their right hand, the student right raises their left hand.
And with those handprints that I have, they’ll high five, the left hand, the high five, the left, the right hand, they’ll put their right hand finger one on that certain spot where it should be. And we spent a lot of time just going over that. At that point, what we’ll do is we’ll actually talk about the piano. And so looking at the piano during music lessons near me, there are two different kinds of notes. There’s black notes and then there’s white notes. And so depending on the students and just kind of gauging with them, I’ll just say, can you play some white notes? Can we play some black notes and just get really comfortable with that.