Some Things to Keep In Mind When Teaching Young Musicians

If you need help with teaching young musicians or beginners, this page is for you.

Is it your first time teaching a musician? Do you need more tips to make for a productive lesson? There are a few things that must be considered when teaching young musicians at first.

What Not To Forget When Teaching Young Musicians

If you are the teacher of young students in music, you have an absolute responsibility for giving the student one thing…

For Example...

Sometimes I would walk into lessons with a composition professor after I had spent all night fretting over how to fix a certain details in the music that was viewed as horrible or not good enough, only the teacher didn't give enough direction or details to even justify the edits.

The student, if just starting out, doesn't have the same amount of knowledge you do about note names, chords, and other structures within the language of music.

Their attention to detail is inhibited by all that is going on around them. Keep their attention by drawing them in with colorful displays on the music pages that you have.

Drawings help students better relate to the musical material as will be presented in more detail later. Teaching young musicians through visual examples have shown to have a higher impact on the musician's mind. Make each note have a colored notehead. Younger students could possibly remember colors more than they could remember sounds. Of course, not all students are the same.

What if Your Student Has Disabilities?

The student may have some sort of disability that needs to be addressed early on to help them succeed in this field. Young musicians often express different ways and patterns in learning different kinds of material including music.

Ways for Teachers to Teach Students Without Music Theory

Teachers, it is important that when you are teaching kids that are learning music for the first time (especially students that are four and under) that you break down your teaching strategies into very basic parts. Sometimes you're sentences should be as direct as, "put your finger on these two keys," or "see this right here, press it." Let them figure out gradually what sound is. Let them find out that when you press this key, this is what happens.

Learn how to describe music to kids. For example, how would you explain the crescendos and decrescendos in a piece of music? Some would say you describe it in the form of a musical mountain. Make a picture of what this mountain looks like. Mountains go up and down. Use coloristic, simple, but descriptive language that will appeal to the students. The example above will testify to that.

Tell them, for example that melodies go up and down. Show them the notes. Depict to them that the notes on the staff are like power polls connected to power lines and the power poles follow the path of a street that has hills that slope up and back down. Tell them that harmony happens when the power poles are at different points on the line. Obviously, come up with better examples than this.

Other methods for teaching young musicians are to come soon.