Developing Independent, Expressive Young Musicians from the Inside Out
Begin the journey of learning piano the way children naturally learn music - by immersion through listening, movement, singing and other essential activities designed for music development.
FALL 2025
Welcome! I’m so glad you’ve found your way here — whether you’re actively seeking piano lessons for your child, curious about how they can grow musically, or simply exploring your options.
What you’ll discover here isn’t a typical piano program.
Built on the Music Moves for Piano curriculum that is a holistic, developmentally-grounded learning experience rooted in Music Learning Theory (MLT) — activities are designed to nurture not just piano skills, but deep musicianship, creativity, and lifelong musical thinking.
This year, I will be launching a new hybrid format that blends:
In-person paired lessons
Large group and ensemble classes
Online classes and resources
Asynchronous support and feedback
A connected community of families and learners
Every component is intentionally crafted to support your child’s musical growth — from their very first notes to confident, expressive playing.
If this sounds like the kind of learning environment you're seeking, I'd love to learn more about your family!
Please complete the interest form to help me build the fall schedule and design an experience that works best for all students.
What makes the Piano Pathway unique?
With the Music Moves for Piano curriculum, students begin their piano journey the way children naturally learn music: to hear and play with understanding. Like learning a language, music must be learned in the proper sequential order to meaningfully learn music long-term. This isn’t just about learning notes — it’s about developing real musicianship.
We sing first, play second.
Your child learns to hear, understand, and create music before reading it — just like we learn to speak before reading.
The whole body learns.
We use movement and play to develop rhythm, flow, coordination, and ease at the piano — setting the stage for expressive, injury-free playing while embodying music.
Creativity is encouraged early.
From day one, your child will explore, improvise, and make musical decisions — cementing learning and cultivating musical independence.
They explore the full range of the piano.
We don’t start with middle C or premature 5-finger playing. Children explore black and white keys, high to low registers, and playing patterns beginning with gross-motor movement.
Short pieces with big impact.
Engaging pieces are designed to be learned through sound, felt in the body, remembered, and easily changeable — perfect for young, developing brains.
They’ll grow with the program.
As your child moves beyond Keyboard Games, we transition to formal instruction and gradually introduce notation, theory, and more complex improvisation — always with audiation and understanding at the core.
Bottom line: Your child won’t just play piano.
They’ll think musically, move musically, and create musically.
Ready to nurture your child’s musical path?
Complete the piano interest form.
“A musician who audiates must internalize music and not merely imitate it or memorize it. Imitation–even perfect imitation–is shallow and fleeting. To audiate…they must process musical information. And to do that, they must learn to understand music. A lifetime job.”
— Eric Bluestine from The Way Children Learn Music
A Music Learning Theory (MLT) approach to piano
Tune in. Grow deep. Play free.
How a child begins their piano studies will shape their relationship to music and any instrument for life. At Song’s Keys, students will be given the essential tools to ensure that music is understood and felt; to approach the piano with creativity, audiation and meaningful expression.
Goals + Skills of MLT-Informed Beginning Piano
• Learn to hear and think musically
• Sing and chant in multiple tonalities and meters
• Develop pitch awareness and tonal accuracy
• Develop rhythmic elements of flow, pulse and meter
• Build a vocabulary of rhythm, tonal and harmonic patterns
• Move and play to steady beats in two different meters
• Coordinate the body, arm and hand using healthy technique to play the keys
• Explore and create with keyboard sounds
• Play short pieces and improvise with patterns
• Differentiate between beat levels, duple and triple meters and other contrasting elements
Beginning Piano with Traditional Methods
X Wastes time and energy teaching non-essentials while sacrificing what children really need musically
X Dependent on music notation and the 5-line staff without musical understanding
X Introduces 5-finger playing prematurely
X Lacks exposure to a variety of rich musical content
X Implements the wrong order of how we learn music
X Not built on evidence-based research of both music development and psychomotor development
X Misses the most important skill of musicianship - to hear and play music with understanding
Learn more about MLT-based Piano with this video by Felicity Breen
When do they learn to read music?
Let’s compare reading language to reading music. When we read words and sentences, we already have a basic understanding of the language with years of a speaking vocabulary. When children learn to decode notes on the staff before establishing aural understanding of music, it is not true literacy. While it may seem as if they are reading music, they are simply decoding abstract symbols. Meaningful understanding of musical syntax is absent, and when the “reading” becomes more challenging, children quickly lose interest and connection to playing. Even traditional ear training usually misses developing audiation.
With Music Moves for Piano, while students will experience exposure to visual symbols, they will acquire a wealth of comprehensive skills and musical understanding in the optimal order with Keyboard Games A, B, and Book 1 before beginning formal reading and writing in Book 2.
Learn more about Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe
What is the best way to learn a language? By immersion. Same with music.
The learning sequence for language (and music)
1 LISTEN -> 2 SPEAK (perform) -> 3 THINK + CONVERSE (audiate + improvise) -> 4 READ + WRITE
How do we learn language by immersion? First by listening, imitating words, conversing, then going on to read and write. This sequence applies to how we learn music. The field of piano pedagogy is largely dominated by old-school tradition rooted in the late 1800s, yet traditional methods have not fundamentally changed with the same general goal: to learn music by reading. Imagine if we taught our youngest children to read before they could speak! Thankfully, the music education field has come a long way in research and applying evidence-based methods. Edwin E. Gordon is one music educator who devoted his lifetime to researching how we learn music and developed Music Learning Theory (MLT). Sequential music learning and audiation (listening to music with understanding) are two tenets of MLT. Audiation is the key to musicianship in order to successfully play any instrument, to perform in groups with others, and to truly understand and enjoy listening to music. Reading standard notation before establishing aural understanding actually obstructs musicianship. We use an audiation-based method with Music Moves for Piano to provide a strong foundation for developing musicianship, because “without music language, music instrument lessons will be attempts at decoding meaningless music notation” (Music Play).
