Mayenne's Milestone: Playing a Complete Song On Piano

It must have been every parent's dream to see their child playing a song on the piano. Whenever a piano is brought to a child, the first song that every parent would attempt to teach their offspring must have been "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".

I don't want to force Mayenne to learn the song in the shortest time possible just so that I could boast. I believe that we need to wait for the right maturity for her to appreciate and pick up the song. She must understand the relation of tones on the keyboard so that she can play anything that she wants, and not just the songs that we teach her.

The challenge in teaching the song to a young child is the note sequences. She has already got the rhythm right months back, except she's just hitting all the wrong notes. To add to the difficulty, Mayenne is an absolute mule when it comes to the piano. Most of the times, she refuses to be taught. Whenever she played on the piano, there can be no other fingers laying on the keys. She would promptly swipe any "foreign objects" away. We would have to wait patiently for that "learning mode" to be on before she willingly allow us to drill her into the notes and rhythm of the song.

On April, she finally wanted to play the song, and she would willingly follow our directions, playing the note that we pointed at. Here, she did it with a little help from me, except for the dominant (5-note) jump:



Yesterday, while we were not noticing, Mayenne went to her toy piano and instinctively played out the entire song unaided. She must have been so pleased with herself, because she played at least 10 times over and over. Initially I didn't want to take out my phone to video-record, because I foresaw she would rush to my phone (as she always did). But very soon my wifey came into the room and screamed (figuratively):"Why aren't you recording this?" Fortunately for us, Mayenne was still in her repeat mode, and here it is, documented, her milestone, my pride.

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