A few months ago I splurged on the whole “Music for Little Mozarts” package. This comes with a music book, a workbook (coloring, drawing, etc.), a CD, flashcards, another “music discovery” book with another CD (these are pretty worthless as far as I can tell), two stuffed animals (“Mozart Mouse” and “Beethoven Bear,” who feature in all the materials), and a magnetic/dry-erase musical notation board with magnetic notes. I also got the teacher’s guide, but I don’t think this helps much.
By the way, we tried another music package–it sucked badly. This, by contrast, is professional and well-thought-out in practically every way.
This is a very basic, from-absolute-ground-zero package. I appreciate the very gradual pace, which begins with low and high sounds, then talks about loud and soft, then the groups of two and three black keys. Then you start playing two black keys together, then three, then you start going up and down the black keys… Anyway, it’s very gradual.
The CD helps a lot. It basically contains the entire text and tunes from the music book, and is written in a sort of “story” form–Henry bought it anyway. We’ve listened to the CD many times (all at Henry’s request), so now the tunes (if you want to call them that–they are as basic as you can imagine) are totally ingrained. So he really got into it. He sleeps with Mozart Mouse and Beethoven Bear (you might not think the stuffed animals are necessary, but they really help).
As to lessons, well, I took the same approach here that I did to teaching him to read: if he says “no,” then we absolutely don’t do it, and probably not the next day either. If we take breaks of a week or even a couple weeks, that’s absolutely OK. On the other hand, if he seems enthusiastic, we kick things up a notch, and we have lessons daily or even, rarely, a few times in a day. We received the package around March 15 and were at it nearly daily for a couple weeks. Then there were a couple weeks in which we did only 3-4 lessons total. Since then we’ve been practicing fairly regularly, not a lesson every day but 2-5 per week.
Results: we’ve gone through half of the first book and have ordered the second. He can actually play the little tunes in the book, and when he successfully pulls one off, and I say, “Yay!” then he claps and says “Yay!” very excitedly himself. He’s very proud of himself. He’s getting better at putting the fingers where they belong, and also he can play different notes with different fingers.
I’ve also been teaching him “Chopsticks” which is his favorite thing to play. Today he almost got it right. I just had to prompt him once.
He loves the flashcards. We’ve gone through them many times by now and he likes to do all 32, or whatever it is, in one shot. This takes time because many of the cards involve clapping rhythms written on the cards. He can’t do this yet just by looking at the notes–he has to look at the back of the card to read the numbers written under the notes–but he’s very good at the actual clapping part, which I guess is the important part for now. He does know a lot of the signs inside and out anyway, in no small part because of the powerpoint & LR flashcards we’d done before.
Anyway, so far we can recommend “Little Mozarts.”
BTW, I had 8 years of piano lessons as a kid myself, and once upon a time, for a short time, earned a living teaching violin. So I have experience with this sort of thing–your experience may be different, and if you haven’t got a clue about where to start or what to do, you might want to hire a teacher (or not!). We are currently playing on an electronic keyboard (which he loves to explore and make noise with). If he gets into it a lot more, we might actually get a piano.
