Preschool Piano Lesson

A few months ago we received a piano from some friends moving out of state who couldn't take it with them.  I am beyond grateful for this gift!  The kids are so excited about having it, and I'm just as excited to get them interested in music.  After some time getting them acquainted with this giant instrument, I've decided it's now time to get serious about them learning how to play.

Upfront let me just tell you that I'm not a music teacher, and I don't actually know how to play the piano!  I can identify all the keys and play some basic kids songs.  So that's where I'm going to start.  Once the kids get these things along with some basics of reading music, I'm going to look into piano lessons for them from a professional.

I wanted a very simple way to label the keys so that the note names were easily identifiable.  I found these great removable all purple labels.  They are small plain circles.  I originally was going to look for colored circles as I thought it might be brighter and more fun, but I couldn't find a package that had the color variety I needed.  I didn't want to duplicate colors for note names, so the blank ones were perfect.  I pulled out our markers and labeled them accordingly.  

I also originally planned on doing only one or two octaves, but then I decided to go ahead and label the whole thing.  We can all sit at the piano bench together, and this way everyone can use the labeled keys.  The great part about these removable stickers is they peel up easily.  We can play games by removing one or two of the notes and identifying the missing one!

This week we've been working on a pirate theme so I thought a song about rowing in a boat was appropriate.  I made this cheat sheet on a little card, but I've also created a full size version you can download for free here.  It includes the lyrics and the note names in the corresponding colors I used on our keyboard so it will be easy to identify which key to play.  This is definitely the easy part, however getting the rhythm right is going to take some work.  I'm excited to see how we progress though!

I plan on adding more sheets, as we choose and learn songs this way as well.  The document is editable so if you end up using different colors on your keyboard than I have, you can change them before you print.