Keyboards For Future Success

Impact to My Classroom

# of Students Impacted: 525

When this grant was originally requested, the idea was to have Lake Park Elementary School students in grades 3-5 participate in the grant.  After receiving the grant I decided that we would make this an entire school project and have all 525 students participate.  This program turned out to be very successful!  Piano keyboard instruction was the main part of our music classes for the best part of four months.  All of the grade levels started in the same way: finding combinations of 2 or 3 black keys, eventually moving to finding middle C and then finding all 6 C's on the piano.  Our 5th grade students advanced thru about 30 pages in our book and were reading and playing musical notation.  Each grade level was able to advance to a certain level.  Our Kindergarten were comfortable enough to find all the C's, D's, F's and B's on the keyboards.  Many 1st grade students could play simple melodies using finger patterns while our 2nd graders began to play melodies using the black keys of the piano.  Our 3rd and 4th graders were able to make it to page 16 in our book and play "Old MacDonald".   This required the students to use both the right hand and left hand.  As an observer, you could see their minds working hard.  It is exciting to think about how this program will develop over the next few years!  The whole idea of this project was to expose the students to the basics of the keyboard and some musical performance opportunities.  It turned out to be more successful than I had originally thought it would be.  As a side note, I was surprised how many of the students told me they got keyboards for Christmas.