Teaching Young Children, Pt. VII - Open Strings

The last several posts have been building to where young students will begin playing music. Keep in mind that for this series of posts “young children” are defined as ages 5 through 8; that being the case the job of the teacher is to present material which children can be successful with, master in short order and feel a sense of accomplishment playing.

In last month’s post students where working on a simple open string exercise to develop the coordination in their thumb required when plucking and moving from string to string. Students did not need to know the letter names of strings (E,A,D,G,B,E) – they only need to know strings by numbers (1,2,3, etc…). This month students will work with only two open strings “G” and “D”. In order to work with these two strings students will be introduced to the concept of sight reading. If the teacher is unable to read music, it will be greatly beneficial for the instructor to learn to read music even on a basic level to in order to accompany their student in future lessons.

The music staff should be introduced with its five lines and four spaces. It should be made clear that the lines are not the strings of the guitar; as the guitar has six strings and the music staff has only five lines – they are not the same. 

Next the teacher will introduce the open strings "G"and "D" - discuss how the music note “G” will be found on the second line of the music staff and that the note “D” is written below the staff. The teacher may develop their own written exercises for the student to practice reading/playing whether the note “G” or “D”. To ease the transition into reading music the teacher should allow the student to write the letter name above/below the music note.

Next month we’ll dig a little deeper into reading music with our young students.