Full list of games

"Fours" is a piano game constructed in exactly the same mold. The child plays numbers and I play the chords. If the symbols below don't line up in your browser, remember that there are always four notes (numbers) for every chord (letter.) The child begins on "Middle C," also known as the number one: "1" The teacher plays the letters, or chords.
1111 2222 3333 4444 5555 6666 7777 8888
C G C F C F G C
I play a kind of funny Chico Marx oom-pah accompaniment using the chord pattern (C G C F C F G C, etc.) Kids find this very easy and refreshing. We play up the piano keys, moving to the right, with the natural goal being for the child to reach the highest key on the piano. I'm pretty "strict," that is, if the child breaks the rhythm or misses a key, we start over. Strangely enough, kids love to go back to the beginning and start over as much as they love going all the way to highest key.Fun variant: Ask them to count up the white keys until they reach the highest white key (starting from Middle C, which to them is #1) and tell you what the "number" of that white key is (it's 29.) This has no musical value except that it makes the child an explorer of the instrument.The object of these games is to make the child a keen and enthusiastic observer of their instrument

something impossible to do when the child is locked into reading only sheet music from a book. Kids need to improvise, however humbly, and essentially all of my games are designed to make fun music outside of sheet music, numbers or conventional.
"Fours" teaches a child that

1. sheet music is not always necessary to have fun with music

2. they have to count while they play

3. music is divided into numbered units

4. piano is a fun thing they can do right away. piano