Piano lessons have been on our list of things we wanted our daughter to participate in, but we were having a hard time fitting it in. When she was in kindergarten, I bought some teaching materials and asked my husband to teach her. Even though I can read music and played an instrument in my youth, I did not take piano and I did not keep up with playing an instrument after high school, whereas my husband did both and is an amazingly talented musician. The problem is that my husband did not have the time to sit down with my daughter or plan out lessons regularly. And so, her piano lessons were few and far between, even though she did learn to play a few songs and seems to have retained much of the information taught to her. We discussed again, as a family, about taking lessons with someone else but I really don't want to over schedule my child and want her to have some time to play with the neighborhood kids when she is not at swim team practice or gymnastics practice. I did not want to be running my children to more than one activity in an evening ans so we tabled paying for piano lessons for another year.
That was until I had the opportunity to review
Hoffman Academy. Before I decided to review piano lessons from Hoffman Academy I checked out what they had to offer, how much it cost and what kind of time investment was required from a child and parent.
What
Hoffman Academy offers is 60
FREE online video piano lessons! Yes, you did read that correctly! It is free. They also offer a
FREE download of supplemental materials from
Lesson 1 from Unit 1. Then if you like what you used for the lesson 1 supplemental materials you can purchase the complete materials for Unit 1, which is 20 lessons for only $19. This also includes mp3s of the songs they will be playing in both a practice CD and playing CD. It's not hard to do the math and realize you are paying
LESS THAN $1 a lesson! When I looked in to lessons around us, the cost for lessons were an average of $15 for a half hour lesson plus the cost of workbooks/CDs/software.
But it's not just the fact that these lessons are completely affordable that I love, but that they can be done in the comfort of my home and I don't have to pack up the kids and drop my daughter off at a lesson for a half hour and try to figure out how to entertain my son during that short time. All the lessons are between 5-15 minutes and you can pause the video whenever you need to in order to practice a skill or rewind it to hear it over again. Lesson 1 is only 11 minutes and at the end they are playing Hot Cross Buns! My daughter was so proud that she couldn't wait to show her dad what she just learned. You can watch her play it below.
The supplemental materials help reinforce the information they learned from the video lesson and is presented in an easy to understand format that is interesting. Once your child has finished the 20 lessons in Unit 1, you can move on to Units 2 and 3, each which have 20 lessons in them and each unit has the supplemental materials and CDs available for $19.
I do recommend watching the video alongside your child to help them keep their focus and be assured that they are understanding the information being presented to them. But like I said, lessons are 5-15 minutes each. Whereas my husband isn't able to regularly sit down and give her a lesson he prepared, I (or he can) sit down with her while she take a video lesson. She still receives live verbal feedback and personal interaction, but more importantly it is a nice parent child togetherness opportunity. I think I will be learning piano myself.
My 4 year old son decided to join us for lesson #2 which was 10 minutes long and we learned the musical alphabet. He picked it up just fine and was very interested in it. I think I may add this program in to the preschool-at-home day I do with my son. He does have a high interest in music and if he wanted to try learning now, I am not going to deter that interest, but help foster it. Now, we're talking teaching 3 of us to play piano for $19 for 20 lessons.
We have been enjoying these lessons so far and I hope that enjoyment continues for all of us.
I encourage all my readers to check out the FREE online video piano lessons from
I love that they are making music lessons more accessible and affordable for all children!
I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.
