How can music dramatically affect your child's development and lifetime success?

[ChrisSalter]

Kimber,

We are working on a payment plan and a discount for BrillKids members, plus some cool bonuses, but I want it to be the best package we can do, and easy for the members. Working on it every day to get the package together, please be al little more patient.

Thanks

Chris

[ChrisSalter]

We have had some spirited discussion in this forum, with lots of curiosity and different points of view. We don't shrink from that, we hope to learn from it and take the best ideas and bring those tools to our homes to help our children grow.

With that in mind, we shared a free report on "Is Music a Birthright?" that gives some perspective the challenges of learning music, and their roots, some of which was brought out in our discussions. SoftMozart has some similar, more in depth articles on the origins and challenges of traditional music notation as well. What I also added, to try and give some perspective of the range of approaches and choices, is a series of posts about the four common approaches to learning piano (up to now). Both Hellene of SoftMozart and I believe that our methods begin to shape a "fifth way", but they were both developed in the context of the limitations of the others, trying to compensate for those gaps and yet leverage their strengths. Though each method has its advocates and champions, including Hellene and I for our own, and those advocates can be as we have seen quite passionate and compelling, NONE OF THESE APPROACHES IS PERFECT. We do strive to honestly "perfect" our process every day, with more and more knowledge, and this forum has been I think very fruitful in its exploration of the options. Here is my latest contribution to that conversation.

Below is the link to that section of the forum.

http://forum.brillkids.com/teaching-your-child-music/four-common-approaches-to-learning-piano-some-pros-and-cons/msg60967/#msg60967

[nancylls]

Hi Chris

I am really impressed by the Piano Wizard Academy method of teaching. I have started my son on keyboard at 3 years old. He is now (4yrs 1 mth old) trying to learn In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. He really loves the song ...  But getting a 3 year old to practise (esp when the learning gets tough) can be quite demanding ... :P I usually bribe him with a short pink panther cartoon should he be able to focus and concentrate.

I really hope music would be his motivation and not have to resort to Pink Panther cartoon! :p Will you be offering this system to Brillkids member at discounted price? Thanks ...

[ChrisSalter]

Dear parents,

As promised we have been busy working on a few special bonuses for Brillkids parents. One that is very special is my mentor Don Beattie and his wife Delayna, the team that helped create the Piano Wizard Academy have agreed to join this forum. Let me give you some background on them, both general and specific.

Don and Delayna Beattie

   During the course of their careers, Don and Delayna Beattie have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands with their enthusiastic love of music and young people, gift for piano teaching and special devotion to Beethoven.  Individually and together, they have appeared in music programs, performances and festivals in all fifty of the United States, Canada, Germany and Austria.  In June of this year, Don retired after 30 years as Director of Piano Pedagogy  in  the School of Music at Southern Illinois University Carbondale while Delayna has enjoyed a thirty year professional career as an independent music teacher.  They are parents of four children and proud grandparents of Emma Elizabeth.

   They have been blessed with countless opportunities to share their love of music and people as founder and directors of the Beethoven Society for Pianists, published authors and composers with Edition HAS and Warner Bros. with their compositions performed at the White House and throughout the world, teachers and performing artists for school children throughout the country, church music performers, master of ceremonies for World Piano Pedagogy Conferences, featured clinicians in Music Teacher National Association Conventions and for G. Henle music publishers  and as founders and directors of Piano Wizard Academy and authors of the Piano Wizard Academy's music curriculum and 50 DVD piano lesson series for Music Wizard Group.  Currently, they are “house parents” to 300 college students in an apartment community in Carbondale, Illinois where human kindness, music, food and friendship mix to create one of the most outstanding living experiences for young people in their community.

On a personal note, Don's work as a new group piano teacher at Carbondale over 30 years ago changed my life profoundly. Through his work I learned not only to play piano but to play things like Back fugues, Chopin Preludes, Beethoven Sonatas and works of Debussey, Bartok and more. I not only learned about piano but about music, and education and bringing love and spirit into the classroom. I ended up with a double major in music and linguistics though I had no prior music experience before college, his teaching and influence were that profound and effective. Years later when I developed the Piano Wizard game I shared it with my old friend and he made several suggestions, and then offered to develop the curriculum for it. That "research and development took about 18 months or so, and then he came to my son's school and did a "boot camp" for the kids for a week, and blew us all away with the impact and excitement of that magic combination of the game, his and Delayna's curriculum, and their hands on teaching. I realized that they could bring all the elements of music to the game that it was missing, and make it a profound vehicle for true musical enrichment and learning. We all invested another 18 months or more into creating a 50 lesson video series, and extending even further the original curriculum, and thus was born the Piano Wizard Academy. While not perfect, and always complemented by great music teacher, it is a breakthrough in music learning, even more powerful because it empowers the parents to coach their children in music without having to do all the heavy training and lifting normally required.

Don is the greatest teacher of any subject I ever had, and it is my blessing and privilege to share he and Delayna and their work with Brillkids parents and the world. He changed my life, and I hope he can help you change your children's lives for the better as well.

Thanks

Chris

[ChrisSalter]

More free music games online

http://69.93.17.74/Music/Games-Demos/Welcome/Memory/index.cfm

This one is a great memory game for ear training.

Here are some more.

http://69.93.17.74/Music/Games-Demos/Welcome/index.cfm

Enjoy,

Thanks

Chris

[ChrisSalter]

-Cost saving option for overseas members-

Hi  Chris

I was so excited when I saw that the offer had come out to brillkids members - have been waiting and watching for it. I have over the last few weeks managed to convince my husband that it would be worth the expense  - helped by your posts etc. So I went to order it this morning to find that the post and packing was another £90.82 (GBP)  which has meant that the cost has now become prohibitive for us.

Is there anyway of obtaining this in the UK to reduce the costs - for example have you got enough brillkids members from the UK who want this that you could send out a mass order to 1 of us so we could then help each other distribute between ourselves? Dont know just an idea but Im so disappointed  - and I know all the arguments around the cost - its just the hidden cost of post and taxes has rather blown us away.

Look forward to hearing from you
Kind regards
Brillkids Mom

Brillkids Mom,

Where most of the challenge is is with the keyboard. I don't know if you noticed but we offered a version without a keyboard included, that saves about $100 US, but also drops the shipping cost pretty dramatically. (http://www.AutomatedSalesMachine.com/app/?Clk=3973986, then just log in and then scroll down on the exclusive offer page to the actual offer and choose the unit WITHOUT keyboard on the right)

By purchasing a keyboard locally you often save quite a bit on postage, as the weight of the package drops dramatically. ANY MIDI compatible keyboard will work with the game, but we do like the M-Audio line of KeyRig 49, which has a street price of around $100, mainly because it is simple, lightweight, and powered by the USB. (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/KeyRig49.html) If you follow this link you can track down and contact their international distributors and find resellers in your area. Here in the US Apple stores carry them, and they are popular in music stores as well.

Taxes of course are beyond our control, but we have found that for international customers the option of getting the bundle without keyboard included and finding that locally saves them quite a bit.

I also just got confirmation that Don and Delayna Beattie will conduct the monthly teleconferences starting in January to guide people through the coursework and help make sure people have the best possible results with the  Piano Wizard Academy.

I hope this helps, we actually recently had to raise our regular price $50 to $599 without any bonuses, because of increasing wholesale expenses on keyboards, but worked out this special bundle for Brillkids members, and offer the option of purchasing the keyboard locally to save more money as well. We actually are worried about internal availability of the keyboards for our domestic customers this Christmas, so we encourage Brillkids members to order early or even domestic customers may have to source the keyboards themselves.

Finally, let me share this letter we just got, it was addressed to Don and Delayna, but I think you can see, that if you can swing it, it will be more than worth it.

"Hi Don,
 
Thanks for taking your time to reply my email.
We really appreciate the Premier mode in Piano Wizard.
My 8 years old son enjoys so much playing the accompany for many songs from Academy 1 to 5.
It's a joy to see my 5 years old daughter played the main melody of  Jolly Old Saint Nicolas and my son played the Harp accompany with her. (My 5 years old daughter has finished Academy 1 and is having a lot of fun with Academy 2.)
My son also loved playing the string assemble for Morning in Colorado. (He wanted to make sure that I mentioned this to you.)
It made the piano learning so much fun to him.
He used to have a lot of power struggle with me for practicing piano and taking the private piano lessons before we got Piano Wizard.
Now, he just practices all by himself and have a lot of fun to try all different accompany.
He even tried step 3 & step 4 for those accompany.
I was very pleased with your program.
Thank you for developing such a fun and educational program.
One thing makes piano wizard so attractive to him is he can challenge me on playing the accompaniment.
He always gets higher scores than I do and gets to 100% faster than I do.
He is very proud of himself. He can finally beat Mom in piano. 
That is an important motivation for him to keep going on.
 
I will for sure find a private teacher after he finishes number 80. But for now, he doesn't need a private teacher. You guys and the program have been his teachers.

Piano Wizard has enriched our family's piano experience so much.  My son's private lessons have never been so much fun and rich. It's not how much money we have saved through this program. It's HOW MUCH we have learned from this program that attracts us. (Of course, we did save a lot of money through this program.)

--We also appreciated you mentioned a lot of music masters in your DVDs (not just techniques). It's such a great introduction for the kids to the wonders of music.

Again, thank you so much!! May God bless you richly.
 

Thanks,

Michelle
God bless you!"

Brillkids Mom, a lot of other people overseas have the same concerns as you, so I will be reposting this without your name so they can also look at this option.

Thanks

Chris

[Ouroboros1]

No offense, but the same material is copied into 4 different threads.  It's kind of "spammy"

[ChrisSalter]

Yeah, not sure how these things work, they seem like separate threads, for example I get an email when someone responds to some thread I responded to, so I know something is new, but when someone starts a new conversation or responds to a thread I may have read but not responded to, I don't get any notice. It has also spawned about 40 different threads, so easy to get lost in it all. I decided to post it where I had ongoing conversations with people. Also, each group might have some overlap, but often there were completely different people in each thread, so I felt like I was leaving some people out. Don and Delayna are for me a major benefit to this forum, so I wanted to share that, and lots of people are overseas, so when I answered that concern I felt a lot of other people might want that option too.

Thinking better, perhaps I should have just posted a link or reference back to the new thread I created introducing them.

Thanks for the feedback!

Chris

[Classical Magic]

Thanks, Chris, those tips are very interesting!

I remember my mum used to play her classical music CDs for us whenever we were studying for tests at school and I think it did help us focus on what we were reading -- not to mention, I eventually did the same thing when I needed to concentrate on work! 

I also believe that it is possible to "pass on" your love of music to your kids, even if you can't play an instrument or carry a tune. My mum was able to do it, so I think I can manage to do the same too!

 
  Check out   http://www.classicalmusicmagic.com/MusicandBrain.html  - There are many ideas about educating children via classical music as well as a bibliography of resources that are very helpful. Your mum had the right idea.  Cheers, Marjorie

[eva35]

Hi Chris,

My daughter is 15 month old. Is it too early to try out the piano wizard program?

Thanks,
Grace

[honeybabies]

 Thanks a lot! I have sent my four year old to music lessons.  She wants to learn to play lots of musical instruments such as the harp an violin but only piano classes are available in our  vicinity.

[LMsMum]

I am not sure whether this piece of research has been mentioned before:

http://www.naturalnews.com/029324_music_brain.html

The better ability to comprehend speech in a noisy environment, which is something I would like to see improved in LM, has been mentioned too.

[ShenLi]

Great article LMsMum! Karma! Reinforces what Medina wrote in Brain Rules for Baby.

I am not sure whether this piece of research has been mentioned before:

http://www.naturalnews.com/029324_music_brain.html

The better ability to comprehend speech in a noisy environment, which is something I would like to see improved in LM, has been mentioned too.

[LMsMum]

Indeed! I have been following posts about this great book on your blog (which is great too!).

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