All about the Piano Fun Method Series
About the author
MDA Piano Academy uses revolutionary, Japanese-developed piano methods for beginners, known as Piano Fun. The author of this method, ITO Yoshimi, is an Alexander-Technique licensed pianist and piano pedagogue. Her extensive research, which included body mapping and neuroscience, resulted in a novel method of teaching piano that promotes healthy musical development in young children through proper piano technique.
Main feature of Piano Fun
1 Cute & Fun!
When humans come across something interesting, their brains produce dopamine. It inspires our curiosity and leads to motivation and focus. It creates seamless pathways to learning. This is the most efficient, productive, and effortless learning process.
2. We can raise more creative, happy, and intelligent children by adapting to brain development.
Our brain undergoes its own developmental stages. The key to your children's future success is to stimulate them appropriately while not disrupting their progress.
The Piano Fun method encourages children to use their hands and fingers, such as adding stickers to their music, before engaging in tool-based activities such as writing with a pencil and crayons.
3. They will want to practice on their own!
Lessons are given with famous tunes which we heard them somewhere, without any pressure! This creates a virtuous cycle of "practice is fun" and "practice makes you better.
4. Good technique from the start!
Piano Fun is suitable for children as young as three years old. It teaches healthy piano playing techniques based on human anatomy from the start, giving all students a comfortable start in terms of their physical development.
What are all the features of our primary method, Piano Fun?
Piano Fun teaches techniques from the beginning
Pianists use the same basic techniques whether they are complete beginners or professionals. The advantage of this method is that you can learn it from the start.
Playing the piano is a physical activity.
Limited verbal explanations
This method limits verbal explanations to a minimum. This is because our brains use slightly different pathways to comprehend verbal explanations and learn physical actions.
The best way to learn physical action is to observe and imitate the teacher's demonstration.
Observation
Students must pay close attention to the teacher's actions in order to emulate them.
Paying close attention improves their concentration and helps them stay focused on their current task.
Observation produces a strong focus.
Learn all elements together, one at a time, without separating them
Playing the piano requires understanding the pitch, length, and location on the keyboard, as well as reading music and determining which fingers to use, and then combining them. All of these actions must be carried out simultaneously.
If you learn each of these elements separately, you will never be able to put them all back together in the same way that they were taught as a whole.
As a result, the most efficient and understandable method of learning is to learn them all at once, gradually building them up one by one from the beginning.
Playing the piano requires multiple tasks at the same time.
Learning each of them separately does not result in successful assemblies.
Coarse motor skills and fine motor skills
🤸🏻Gross motor skills : large movements that uses the whole body (walking, running, jumping, etc.)
Stage for developing the body's core
♪ Including maintaining posture
♪ Sound play with percussion instruments
♪ Rhythmic exercise
📝Fine motor skills: precise movements using hands and fingers (drawing, writing, using chopsticks, grasping small objects with fingers, etc.)
Stage of developing peripheral nerves such as fingertips, etc.
♪Drawing and writing
♪Using utensils such as chopsticks
♪Picking up small objects
♪Doing different things with both hands
🎹 Delicate finger coordination requires good control of the trunk (the body's core), wrists, arms, and shoulders. In other words, it is critical to develop core strength beginning in childhood.
Following gross motor activities (using the entire body to feel and move to music), children can smoothly transition to fine motor activities (playing the piano).
Proprioceptive Sensation and Tactile Sensation
Those are two essential senses for piano playing.
🎼 Proprioception (kinaesthesia): the sense of knowing the position and movement of each part of the body; reducing to playing wrong notes on the piano; delicate keyboard control; precise speed control via keystrokes; pedalling, etc.
🎵 Exercises to develop proprioception; Balance ball, balance disc, standing on one leg, catch ball, etc.
🎼 Tactile sensations (tactile sensory processing): sensations received through the skin, or how the brain interprets and uses information from the sense of touch in order to produce delicate touches, such as how much pressure to apply to piano keys.
🎵 Exercises to develop tactile sensations ; Touching and holding various objects (objects of different hardness, texture, weight, and size)
