Simpedia

Sandy L., Nebraska

I have taught in this type of environment. It can be difficult when some students are moving faster than others, or when ability levels vary widely. Are you able to require the parents to attend? Or, is the mom or dad of the 5-year-old attending the class at least? S/he could be a big help if the child gets antsy and needs some guidance to stay on track.

Do you even have the option to cancel the class and get everyone’s money refunded…? I’ve been in your shoes…can you believe for 12 weeks?

Sounds like you had the first class, so if you continue, 5 to go. I’m assuming you are using the workshop materials or just the beginning of level 1 or something. I think you can do it. Here are some thoughts:

1. Knowing the 5 year old will likely be the first to become disengaged, make sure s/he is engaged early and gets whatever info you need to impart early on in the session in case her attention wanders towards the end.
2. Games anyone? Sounds like this group will do better if you keep it light. Lots of people on the ECL have mentioned games. I don’t know all of the ideas out there, but maybe some rhythm games could help with whatever songs you are teaching as well as being an active way to keep this class moving. Do you have some rhythm instruments you could bring to class like maracas, finger cymbals, tambourine, etc? (if appropriate to what you are planning to teach)
3. Young children can be really good at improv due to a lack of inhibition in their playing. By lesson 2 or 3, you may be able to get one student playing a Night Storm left hand for a classmate to improvise over. Duets can help to hold the interest because the students can be involved together. You may even be able to get one older child to play NS LH, other older child to play NS RH, and the 5 year old improvise on high end of keyboard. Maybe they can all switch around on this—depends on how they are doing.
4. Will you be doing any accompaniment? Get them all singing together. You could even bring in some children’s songs and play a bit of accompaniment yourself and let them just sing at end of class to finish things off, or at beginning to engage everyone. For any that can handle it, you could type up chord charts of kids’ songs and give them the ratios so they can learn to play these outside accompaniment pieces (kind of like the holiday songs that came through the ECL).
5. Does the 6 year old sister need a private lesson or just prefer it? If she doesn’t really need private for some special needs kind of reason, it could actually be good to involve her. Sometimes larger groups can be more dynamic—this will just depend on your individual situation with this.
6. If the older kids are progressing more swiftly, I would give them more (variations, arrangements, the accompaniments mentioned above). Let the other kids watch what you present to them, but don’t require the slower ones to do more than they can handle.

I just wrapped up a 12-week situation like this with a 6 year old in a class of older kids—the others were her 9 year old brother, and 2 teenagers. Before the first day, I had advised the mom that this may be too much for the 6 year old. But mom insisted she wanted the girl in class, would be attending with her, and was fine with just going with the flow on how much she could handle. This girl had mom’s full support at home too with practicing. Turned out that she was able to learn the right hand for most songs, but sometimes putting 2 hands together was just too much. Some songs she did not learn much at all, but others she learned well.

Now, at the end of the 12-week session, mom is having brother continue with the rest of the class at my home studio, but plans to continue teaching the 6 year old at her own pace, one song at a time. (Mom will teach her until she is a little older.) Mom herself participates in every class and in fact was the most prolific composer in the class, coming most weeks with variations, new words to songs, then her own compositions, then her own compositions with words. That last bit may not seem completely relevant, but I include it because these kids that are very young and need a ton of support are a great “excuse” to have mom/dad completely immersed in the lesson—in this case with the result that mom was so excited about her own learning, as well as the learning of both her kids.

Ian M., Indiana

I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to stretch your lesson time for 3 students to 50 minutes, especially when one of them is 5 years old, but here’s an idea for an alternative:

If you decide to go forward with this workshop, you might take a step back and reformulate the part about being “locked in to the time grid”. Here’s what I mean by that: Accept that you’re going to be with them for 50 minutes. But then don’t try to deliver Simply Music lesson content for that entire time. Break it up into segments so that the youngest child is getting a break in the middle, doing something physical and perhaps only peripherally related to piano.

You might do something like 20 minutes of lesson content, then just get them moving to some music or singing for 15 minutes, and then come back to some content for 10 minutes or so. You might also talk with the parents for some ideas about what their kids like to do so you can come up with some other ideas about what to include in the “break” times.

The problem is that you understand how to manage a 30 minute lesson for this many kids, and the solution is not to add content so that you come up to the 50 minute mark – it’s to manage the lesson time so that you’re still delivering the content of a 30 minute lesson, but in 50 minutes.