Teacher Resources

Improvisation ideas and alternative notation for pupils who do not read and more. Read about the benefits experienced by learning disabled people when they have been given the opportunity to play a musical instrument. See what has been done by others.

Forum

Join in discussions and share ideas about teaching and learning musical instruments for and by the learning disabled. Encourage others with your success stories.

First Steps in Learning

Teaching a person with a learning disability to play a musical instrument is a slow process, requiring lots of time and patience. There are some ideas here for enabling pupils to read music, but many may never learn to read musical notation - and it doesn't matter. It is still possible for them to learn tunes by rote and to have the satisfaction of playing well-known songs that people can recognise.

ColourMuse by Maxwell Steer

As a composer I¹m very much aware of the 'symphony' of idioms that now surround us. As a piano teacher it's my job to work out which of the available idioms means most to an individual student...

Two and Three Finger Tunes

The first target for a pupil learning to play the piano is to learn to use his fingers on the keys. This can take a long time and a lesson needs to be centred around "2"s and "3"s...

Happy and Sad

Games can be played asking someone to guess which face is being described and why.

Colour Coding (1)

Colette Lankshear found the following method helpful for her son Ben, who has Down syndrome.

Colour Coding (2)

In this version the fingers are coloured. Both thumbs are red, index fingers blue and so on.

Colour Coding (3)

In this version the finger colours are mirror-imaged, so that the child matches colours as he plays.

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