Having decided on “trying before buying”, I downloaded demo versions of “Gentle Piano” and “Guess the Key” games. This went quite smoothly and I had no trouble with the MIDI connection either.
Since the software creator and owner, gave her permission to copy the image of the key stickers from her website to try out the demo, I did so, but rather than using these as guides behind the keys, I coloured them in and turned them into stickers to make it easier for LM to get the idea. This is what the keyboard looks like now (after quite a bit of effort!):
I also downloaded a one-year Soft Mozart curriculum, solfeggio flashcards, as well as the first part of the solfeggio song freely available on their website.
LM has been playing these two games for about a couple of weeks now. I have so far kept our “piano playing” sessions to 5-15 minutes every day, excluding week-ends. During the first week, we started off by listening to the solfeggio song and sequencing the flashcards with solfeggio pictograms. The visual sequence “sank in” easily, and after we sang the song a couple of times, I started hiding one of the flashcards and asking LM to tell me which one was missing. The curriculum suggests prompting the child to count to the missing card, which, I guess, would be appropriate for an auditory learner, but since LM is a visual learner, she did not need to repeat the sequence and would name the missing card almost immediately.
We then played “Guess the Key” game. Being a demo version, it only has two levels covering notes do (C) to mi (E). LM quite liked “helping the elf collect fruit”, but she wanted to “feed the spider too” and would sometimes wait for him to come out and take the fruit. What I like about this game is that it automatically adjusts to your speed, so if you keep missing the notes, it slows down, lets you think without overwhelming you and repeats the same level. If you are progressing well, the game may even “decide” to skip a level. LM is doing well with it, although we still need to do a bit of work on flats and sharps. I have also started covering the screen, as this video suggests, to let her guess the key by ear, as I think it is not only a good pitch-training exercise, but, in LM's case, is a great “listening” exercise, as part of her speech and language development programme.
Before proceeding to Gentle Piano, I first prompted LM to play a five-finger exercise suggested by the curriculum, which involved playing five notes from do (middle C) up and down with the right hand, and then repeating the same exercise but from the small octave with the left hand. Somehow, having done this exercise, LM decided that these keys could only be played by these specific fingers so when we got to “Ode to Joy” in “Gentle Piano” and I prompted her to play the right hand, she would only press the matching symbols on the stickers with this precise fingering. Although the fingering was not wrong, it meant that her focus was more on choosing the correct finger than on playing the tune.
The game gives you two different scores: the one on the left side is for the number of notes you have played correctly and the one on the right side shows how close you have been to the perfect timing. While the bigger the score on the left is, the better you have performed, when it comes to the score on the right, you should strive to bring it as close to 0 as possible. This area of the game, in my very modest opinion, could be improved for young learners. While the left-hand score for hitting the correct notes is represented by flowers, and the more flowers you have got the better you have done, there is no visual representation of the score on the right reflecting your timing. Being a perfectionist, LM would get a perfect or near perfect score in terms of correct notes hit, but her timing, at least initially, was quite far from the ideal and this was not represented in a visual way to have any meaning to her. I have found it difficult to explain to her that while it is great to get so many flowers, we also need to make the number on the right smaller. So this has been of little motivational value to her.
I have, however, been using my usual “token economy” and strong backup reinforcers to incentivise LM and to ensure this activity is perceived by her as highly rewarding. She earns a token every time she plays the piece or does an exercise, and after she completes the token board, she gets a small prize.
We have so far progressed from playing separate hands on the first presentation, to playing both hands on the fourth presentation (with red and blue circles moving horizontally, no pictograms), and I have to say that her transitioning from one presentation to another has been pretty smooth and did not significantly affect her scores, which are now fairly good (that is the score on the right is not higher than the score on the left). I don’t think she is playing by heart yet as her eyes are always on the screen, so it will be interesting to see how she progresses over the two remaining levels. When she plays the piece with both hands though, she sometimes either forgets to change the cord or releases it too soon, so I still need to occasionally prompt her with her left hand to make her learning as “errorless” as possible. According to the creator, “Ode to Joy” is more difficult for little hands in terms of coordination than the other pieces of the elementary level, such as “Hot Cross Buns”, “French Song” and “Jingle Bells”. So, ideally, we should have learned to play those before “Ode to Joy”. But LM seems to be steadily getting there and she is very close to being able to play both hands completely independently.
Overall, I have been quite pleased with LM’s progress so far, which, bearing in mind her motor delay and coordination difficulties, has been pretty good. As a by-product, I have noticed her pencil grip has considerably improved over the past couple of weeks.
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