Lesson 3

We can play a red chord now! You can draw a red dot on your little piano player's right hand on the THUMB (finger #1), MIDDLE FINGER (finger #3), and PINKY (finger #5). These are the finger numbers that are used to play the RED chord. Put the RED stickers on your piano at home and match the dots on their fingers with the stickers. They’ll be ready to play Old Paint next week!

Celebrate Connection
Here are some ideas to bring playfulness to practice time!

• Sing Old Paint with a western accent.
• Kit Kat Keyboard: With the stopwatch on Mom or Dad's phone, time yourself (and Mom or Dad) to see how fast you can play ALL the C's! Now all the F's!
• Primary Chords: When you play the red chord this week, sing, "Red" each time your play it. Now try singing red in a different language: French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German...

Homework: p. 20–21 Students find and color all of the C's and F's.

Kit Kat Keyboard
Now that we know the black keys ‘sol’ well we are ready to master the white keys! Notice that the grouping of the black keys influences the grouping of the white keys. It is important for students to look closely and frequently at the keyboard in the beginning to reinforce keyboard geography. When they are hunting for those C's and F's, refrain from giving too many verbal cues — or talking too much. Just keep singing the key phrases "find a group of 2, down one is C" and "a group of 3 leads to F Yippee!" or saying, "Look again. Does that look right?"

C Position Chant
We learned ‘C POSITION’ this week which means our right “Thumb’s on Middle C and a finger for each key!" When we are in ‘C Position’ each finger is assigned to play the note it is sitting on. We will sing this chant A LOT in class! This week we practiced floating our bubble hands over the keys and then letting them land on ‘C Position’. Continue this at home!

Don’t feel frustrated if it’s tricky for your child at this point to press down ONLY the 1,3,5 fingers… we’ll keep strengthening those fingers and soon it will be easier. Learn more here on how muscle memory works when learning to play the piano and why is it soooo important to emphasize that correct fingers are used when learning chords from the very beginning!

For my convenience, I have preloaded content for the whole semester. I will update each future post with specific time-sensitive info before I send the link each week. If you choose to read ahead you might see details that don’t apply to your child’s class. For this reason I do not recommend reading ahead. Thank you!