Music lessons for special needs children? If you ask the average music teacher about special needs children as students, you may get a blank stare. There isn’t much literature focused on this. Children with special needs may include those with learning disabilities, developmental issues, as well as those on the Autism spectrum. At Park Slope Music Lessons, […]
Tag: teaching music
Our music lessons are fun! We not only want our students to learn how to play songs. We also want them to understand the concepts of music theory which make it easier to transfer to other instruments. Many of our students have started at the keyboard and then added other instruments like ukulele, guitar, recorder, […]
My family loves to watch American Idol as well as The Voice. These competitive singing shows are fun and introduce a new audience to a lot of great songs, old and new. The shows are both well produced and fun and get you involved with each contestant’s story so that you care whether or not […]
By Andrew Ingkavet With all of my students, I stress the importance of memorizing their pieces, especially for performance at a recital. Here’s some of the reasons why. Repetition is the Mother of Skill How many times did Tiger Woods hit a golf ball before ever entering a competition? Apparently he was already golfing at […]
Teaching young kids to read music is quite a challenge. I approach through a long process of micro-steps. It’s the reverse of peeling an onion. It’s a layering technique of building up from tiny kernels of understanding, expanding outwards. The first lessons are always performance focused – get them excited about playing a song! It’s […]
When teaching to read traditional music notation, I separate the 2 parts of pitch and rhythm. Rhythm is easy to teach using stick notation. [update-12-3-12] Stick notation is taking traditional notes and removing the note-head. The note-head is the round dot at the bottom of the stick. The dot is placed on the 5 lines […]
I’ve been teaching how to count rhythm to most of my students using Michiko Yurko’s genius method of naming note values with easy and fun to say words. I highly recommend her book Music Mind Games for all music teachers and home-schoolers and interested parents.. For example, a one beat (quarter note) is called BLUE. […]
We’ve been doing some great explorations of the roots of rock and roll which began with the basic form of the 12 bar blues. These 12 measures are like a pattern, a recipe that hundreds if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of songs have been based. Once you know the “recipe” you can cook […]