Tips for teaching kids the basics?

Whistle
1

When my soon-to-be-seven year old daughter sees daddy playing his whistle, she wants to learn too. I found a standard D whistle was still a little large for her hands, so I picked up a Generations high G for her.

However immediately I am running into some problems. I first tried about 6 months ago and concluded that 6.5, for her at least, was too young to be learning the whistle. My daughter it seems has inherited my perfectionist streak. Usually our lessons would degenerate into tantrums when she felt she wasn’t playing perfectly right away.

She struggles to cover all of the holes, and very quickly becomes disheartened. “It’s too squeaky!!” she’d say, before giving up. The thing is, she does really want to learn but struggles (emotionally) with the inevitable learning curve. I do what I can to encourage her. About as far I got with her was teaching her to consistently cover the top three holes and get reasonable sounding notes out of them. Once you added in the right hand it was just too much for her.

I’m now wanting to try again with her.

Is anyone experienced with teaching young kids the basics of whistles? I’m almost sure as soon as I teach her a basic one octave scale and “Twinkle twinkle little star”, the boost it’ll give to her confidence and she’ll just take off and be out-playing me in 6 months.

I not sure how much of this is I just don’t explain things in a way she can understand.

Are there techniques for explaining whistle playing that work well with young children? “Cover the holes properly” and “breathe gently” just doesn’t seem to do it for my daughter.

Or is 7 still a little young for the whistle?

2

Teaching kids to play whistle used to be one of my occasional joys in life. I even had some “make your own whistle” workshops for kids.

Six or seven is not too young to start a child on whistle as far as I am concerned. But you know, things vary greatly from child to child at that age. Hand size, motor skills and attention spans are all over the place especially if you look at both boys and girls of that age. It really depends on the child. Some children at six or seven may have fingers too slim to cover the holes well (It’s slide whistle time for them!). 9 or 10 years seem to work better in general I think.

I have tried using Gen G and F whistles with some children. I think it is important that you play along in the same key with them though. That can be a challenge for the adult using a high G.

I gravitated to giving the kids Sweetone whistles over some time at teaching. The holes were just a bit smaller and a bit closer together - at least enough to matter for some kids. And they seemed a tiny bit more forgiving. The heads on the Sweetone were also somewhat consistent in my experience.

The basics usually start with getting a note with no fingers covering holes. Take the head off the whistle if you can. Let them see what breath pressure does. Let them use their cupped hands to vary the pitch so they get the concepts of higher and lower notes.

Then start on fingering working down from C sharp to first octave G. Then up to the second octave D. Then on up to second octave G. Then start on simple one octave tunes. Confront C natural if necessary.

Work on the bottom of the first octave next. Have a tune using those notes. With luck and judicious tune selection you can hold off on a having a room of kids hitting high B for a while. They’ll find it anyway, the boys always do for sure.

“Twinkle Twinkle”, “Brother John”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, “The Periodic Table Song” even the theme to “Sponge Bob Square Pants” or some other nasty cartoon theme will work. Let the child pick the tune if that is feasible. The kids just have to know the tune and be shown what steps to take to play. Go slow.

I taught by ear. But I provided notation, tabs and abc’s for the tunes I taught. If they know the tune they won’t use the notations anyway. Reading was never my goal. The kids I worked with came from a wide swath of backgrounds. You won’t have that issue.

Patience, a smile and ear protection worked well. Have fun. Enjoy it. It all goes by too quickly.

Feadoggie

3

I’m the last person that should be saying anything here, as I’m a “newbie” whistler and am learning pennywhistle just as a “child”

Each child is different

I won’t speak about the whistle, but, the reason I did post here is a few years ago I worked with a fellow from Venezuela and he showed me kids from Caracus learning/exposed to classical music as early as two and three years old (some before they could even walk). They were given the instrument very early… so I think it was a tactile learning (toy) that continued to blossom.
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1546
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Sistema

and the program has become a “model” http://www.ihse.org.uk/ and other countries as well.
Everyone here C&F is more qualified than I, however, I did want to mention that I think the biggest “motivation” for the kids to learn was (already have an instrument) SEEING the other kids playing/practicing constantly. Constantly.

There might be some good documentaries out there for your child to watch. (See Jerry Freeman’s post in a different thread about his daughter’s “get well” wish). Try some simple research.

I think the pennywhistle could cure the Earth’s ills if everyone had a pennywhistle to play. Start’em young. Best regards

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ya, I posted this in the Pub TED thread & and a couple of follow on ones

Jose Abreu on kids transformed by music

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I’ve taught classes of school kids using Bill Ochs’ abbreviated book (the first part of the Clarke Tin Whistle book) and Clarke Megs. The kids were in grades 4 and 5, so, 9-10 years old. Most of them did pretty well, although some did have trouble getting the holes covered. Feadoggie, I’m intrigued by some of your ideas and may use them next year. I like the concept of taking off the head to start off with - like learning to get a flute sound with just the head joint. And starting on C sharp down to G, then up to the next G is brilliant!

One thing that’s really important is having students keep fingers quite flat. The natural tendency is to curve them, bringing the small fingertip in contact with the hole, which it won’t cover. The holes should be covered with the pad on the first joint of the finger, and after a bit of playing, a circle should be printed there.

I also have a private student who started at age 8 last year. His parents wanted him to have a head start when he took whistle classes at Willie Week, and he has continued, learning a tune a week from ABC notation, and has many of the tunes learned from memory. He had trouble remembering to put his left hand on top, which is important with kids if they ever might want to play a standard woodwind instrument, but he’s got it now. He figured out how to play the theme from one of his video games, and wanted Christmas carols in December. He developed his own throat articulation, basically a glottal stop, and I’ve left him to that while introducing cuts. I’m taking him along to a daytime session tomorrow, even though his mom says he thinks Irish music isn’t made for playing with other people!! :laughing:

I brought my 2 oldest, cheapest whistles on vacation recently and played my Freeman Bluebird for my 2 little great-nieces, aged 7 and 4. They loved it, and with previous parental permission, I gave them each a whistle and showed them what to do. The 4-year-old’s fingers are too small, and luckily she wasn’t frustrated, but listened while her sister caught on. Interestingly, before I showed her a tune, the 7-year-old played Hot Cross Buns on her own, starting on C sharp! There’s obviously something to C sharp being the first note.

6

A lot of very basic instruction methods (though not for the whistle, that I’ve seen) start out by getting the learner to do a very simple note pattern while the teacher plays a tune over it. This has the advantage of getting the learner doing the rhythm properly from the start. Which matters a lot more than getting the pitches right or getting fussy about squeaks and tone quality. No need to rush into covering a wide pitch range.

Back when I was teaching the recorder, I got the kids marching round the classroom in time to their playing. Which showed them that even at the level they were at then, their music could do something in the real world, get people moving, put some energy into their lives.