Reposting this from another section of the forum
Dear parents,
As promised we have been busy working on a few special bonuses for Brillkids parents. One that is very special is my mentor Don Beattie and his wife Delayna, the team that helped create the Piano Wizard Academy have agreed to join this forum. Let me give you some background on them, both general and specific.
Don and Delayna Beattie
During the course of their careers, Don and Delayna Beattie have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands with their enthusiastic love of music and young people, gift for piano teaching and special devotion to Beethoven. Individually and together, they have appeared in music programs, performances and festivals in all fifty of the United States, Canada, Germany and Austria. In June of this year, Don retired after 30 years as Director of Piano Pedagogy in the School of Music at Southern Illinois University Carbondale while Delayna has enjoyed a thirty year professional career as an independent music teacher. They are parents of four children and proud grandparents of Emma Elizabeth.
They have been blessed with countless opportunities to share their love of music and people as founder and directors of the Beethoven Society for Pianists, published authors and composers with Edition HAS and Warner Bros. with their compositions performed at the White House and throughout the world, teachers and performing artists for school children throughout the country, church music performers, master of ceremonies for World Piano Pedagogy Conferences, featured clinicians in Music Teacher National Association Conventions and for G. Henle music publishers and as founders and directors of Piano Wizard Academy and authors of the Piano Wizard Academy’s music curriculum and 50 DVD piano lesson series for Music Wizard Group. Currently, they are “house parents†to 300 college students in an apartment community in Carbondale, Illinois where human kindness, music, food and friendship mix to create one of the most outstanding living experiences for young people in their community.
On a personal note, Don’s work as a new group piano teacher at Carbondale over 30 years ago changed my life profoundly. Through his work I learned not only to play piano but to play things like Back fugues, Chopin Preludes, Beethoven Sonatas and works of Debussey, Bartok and more. I not only learned about piano but about music, and education and bringing love and spirit into the classroom. I ended up with a double major in music and linguistics though I had no prior music experience before college, his teaching and influence were that profound and effective. Years later when I developed the Piano Wizard game I shared it with my old friend and he made several suggestions, and then offered to develop the curriculum for it. That "research and development took about 18 months or so, and then he came to my son’s school and did a “boot camp” for the kids for a week, and blew us all away with the impact and excitement of that magic combination of the game, his and Delayna’s curriculum, and their hands on teaching. I realized that they could bring all the elements of music to the game that it was missing, and make it a profound vehicle for true musical enrichment and learning. We all invested another 18 months or more into creating a 50 lesson video series, and extending even further the original curriculum, and thus was born the Piano Wizard Academy. While not perfect, and always complemented by great music teacher, it is a breakthrough in music learning, even more powerful because it empowers the parents to coach their children in music without having to do all the heavy training and lifting normally required.
Don is the greatest teacher of any subject I ever had, and it is my blessing and privilege to share he and Delayna and their work with Brillkids parents and the world. He changed my life, and I hope he can help you change your children’s lives for the better as well.
Thanks
Chris