April 13, 2009: Musical Beginnings

Veronika has been curious about playing the piano for a while ("How do you know which notes to play?") so last weekend I taped sticky notes to a few of the keys and labeled them with the letters of the notes, like this:

Then I played "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and wrote down the notes as letters so that she could play it. She seemed to think that was pretty cool and played it a few times. On Saturday, she wanted to play it again but her music had been misplaced (accidentally thrown out) so I got a new sheet of paper with the intention of doing the same exercise but then got distracted by Nikola. As I was taking care of him, I heard Veronika, on her own, picking out the melody for "Twinkle, Twinkle" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (luckily she started on an E so she had enough labeled notes and no sharps or flats). I didn't say anything while she was working for fear of disturbing her but when I went to look afterward, I saw that she got it all right!

As a pianist who began playing the exact same way, I was beaming with pride. Just from seeing me do it once, she made the connection between the notes, the keys and the letters, and then applied her new method to a song of her own. If she can learn "America the Beautiful", she is going to bring down the house in Wisconsin.