A Dream Come True

My daughter's wonderful piano teacher has put together two books of simple folk songs that only use two or three chords. Her approach to teaching is to have them learning the finger patterns for the first 5 notes of every scale from the very first lesson. She developed an ingenious manipulative to show them where to put their fingers, and they start out at the piano learning a simple song by ear, and then moving this slider around to anywhere on the piano and playing the song in every key. So, transposing is introduced at the very first lesson.

Another thing she introduces early is how to play the I, IV, and V chords to accompany a song, which are also transposed everywhere on the piano. These folk song books provide the words and the chords, and the kids play the accompaniment and sing along, transposing them into all different keys.

This has been an amazing boon to us, as my son has become interested in playing the cello (yay!) which has open strings that amount to the I, IV, and V notes for the keys of G and D. This means that we can play any of the songs in A's folk song books, with A on piano playing the accompaniment in the keys of G and D, me on violin or cello playing the melody line, and M on cello playing the bass line. This is what I have been dreaming of from the moment I got pregnant! It is so much fun, and it actually sounds really great. M asks to play music almost every day, and A always want to join in also.  And, now I've figured out that we can also play out of fiddle books, which have lots of songs that can be played using the notes C, G, D, and A in the bass line. They tend to be longer and harder to remember for M (who isn't reading any music or notation), but we've got the "A" parts worked out for a couple of them, and they sound great!

This is truly a great way to start the cello. For one thing, the cello we have is too big for M (we have a 3/4 size and he needs a 1/2 size), so I don't really want him to start fingering just yet, since he'll have to use poor finger positioning in order to get in tune. It is kind of iffy even to bow open strings on a too-big cello, but I just have him use the part of the bow that is right for his arm length, and set the end pen low so he's bowing at the right height (but there is no way to make both the left and right hands hit at the right height at the same time with this too-big cello). And, even if we had a right-sized cello for him, it is better to work on each hand separately, since there is so much going on in each hand, and they are doing completely different tasks. It is too much to try to do them both at the same time to start out. When you're just playing by yourself, it quickly gets quite boring to just play open strings. But as a member of a string band, a kid can be happy for quite a while with open strings.