The Story of Kids Piano! 

Whether you have a piano, keyboard, or even a phone or tablet with a piano app, your family can start learning REAL SONGS today!

Hi, I'm Mr. Zach! Since 2002, I've been teaching music to homeschoolers, and since 2018, I've been designing virtual music courses for schools in West Michigan where I live and teach.

Now I'm offering my virtual courses to homeschoolers everywhere to help more students get a better start to music!

After teaching more than 60,000 lessons, I've learned that the key to success is FUN!

For most kids, the #1 challenge with learning music is difficulty reading notes.... Staffs, clefs, key signatures, time signatures, notes, rhythms, and rests are great for composers because it makes music faster to write, but all those layers of encoding make music harder to read, especially for young kids who have smaller limits on how much information they can process at once... That's why it's so hard to play even a simple song, and why it usually takes several years of private lessons to learn the songs of their dreams. Most don't make it that long!

That's why I started writing music differently for my students. And it worked!

When I started writing music that was easier to read, kids starting learning songs faster and easier than they expected (which is basically the formula for high-motivation)! Their attitudes about practicing totally transformed, and with the combination of easier notes plus more practice, it surprised both me and my students parents when we found that most kids actually wanted to learn harder songs - like Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise! Kids didn't actually want "easy;" they wanted the right level of challenge. That's when music starting to become something they were truly proud of!

Then, when we transitioned back into learning how to read traditional notes, they learned that much faster, too, because instead of learning the instrument, how to use their hands, and developing a sense of rhythm and melody plus reading standard notation all at the same time, now, they were free to focus 100% on just the notes. They were like kids who had already been hearing and speaking a foreign language for a few years, with a solid vocabulary of about 100 songs, ready to attach the shapes and meanings of the elements of standard notation to their already musical minds.

It's a whole new system I've had the pleasure of turning into a series of books and a virtual course made with homeschoolers, by homeschoolers, and now available for homeschoolers everywhere!

So if you'd like to explore a new approach to piano as an activity for your child, I'd LOVE to share everything I've learned along the way to help you and your kids get started! Check out more info about each book and course and then ways to join or enroll below!

Playful wishes,
Mr. Zach :)

Kids Piano! Volume 1: Foundations of Music

Kids Piano uses big, colorful letters to write songs kids love. In Volume 1, we start with just one hand at a time with the most important part of the song: the melody!

Level 1 starts with a dangerous beginner song: Hot Cross Buns, OUCH! (because the buns are HOT!), then in Levels 2-10, transitions from easy starter tunes like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star into sophisticated classical pieces like Vivaldi's Spring, Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, and Beethoven's Ode to Joy, Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, and more!

By the end of Volume 1, kids learn 33 different songs arranged in 10 Levels that give students a constant sense of achievement and makes learning feel like a game!

In my experience, this is about the number of pieces students need to build a comprehensive foundation of rhythms and notes across the keyboard for one hand to prepare them for the next big challenge of piano: playing with both hands together!

Kids Piano! Volume 2: Harmony for Two Hands + Musical Expression

Kids Piano uses a unique strategy to tackle the challenge of playing with both hands at the same time using a unique strategy of adding simple left-hand harmonies to songs we've already mastered in Levels 1-10!

This worked so well that it left room for more, which is why 8 of the 10 levels in Volume 2 are each focused on new elements of musical expression, like:

• Legato and Staccato (Smooth and detached finger styles)
• Forte and Piano (Loud and soft dynamics)
• Accelerando and Decelerando (Speeding up and slowing down)
• 8VA, 15VA, & 8VB (1 & 2 Octaves Higher & Octave Lower) 
• Grace Notes and Trills
• and more!

With each new level, it's clear that students are becoming gradually more creative, competent, fluent musicians capable of ever-increasing creative self-expression! By this point, students are ready to start making a 3-dimensional sound with their songs in Volume 3, where we learn chords and complex harmony!

Kids Piano! Volume 3: Chords, Complex Harmony, & Creative Expression

In Volume 3, students perform their most powerful pieces by in Levels 21-30 by adding chords and complex harmonies to their pieces from Volumes 1 and 2.

Now that they've seen the same song in 3 different ways, this is the volume where kids begin to truly see beyond the sheet music as they start to understand the song as just a launching point for creative expression.

In this volume, students take what they've learned from over 60 other songs and begin to mix-and-match elements of style to play songs their way as they begin to develop their own voice.

In other words, this is when fluency in the language of music begins to take root. Once kids reach this point, music has become a part of them! That's why the goal of Kids Piano is to transform kids into young people fluent in the language of music!