A Different Path to Piano
What if the most important part of learning piano is what happens before your child ever learns to play a piece?
The very first years of piano can shape everything. Piano Pathway is a developmental music program that builds what matters first.
By giving children the necessary experiences to build the underlying and essential skills from the beginning, children:
Learn to hear and think in music
Develop their ear through singing, movement, patterns, improvisation, and play
Create and make musical decisions of their own
Make music with other children
Build the foundation for reading, playing, creating, and performing with understanding
The result? They don’t just learn to play pieces. A child with a strong musical foundation can naturally understand what they're playing, make sense of how music works, trust their musical instincts, and make the music their own.
We don't just skip to the instrument.
We build the musician to play it.
Could this be the right path for your young musician?
Complete the interest form below to explore next steps:
It may look like they’re just moving and singing. But look closer.
What are these children actually learning?
There's much more happening than meets the eye. Through guided group music-making, children embody, think, and perform rhythm, patterns, harmony, and songs, building the musicianship that gives meaning to reading, playing, and performing.
They understand what they're hearing, what they're doing, and how music works.
More Than Piano Lessons: Building a Life in Music
To develop the whole musician, Piano Pathway gives children a complete musical experience, combining focused partner lessons with group music-making “Studio Sessions.” Ages 5-9
Add in our Learning Library, practice resources, asynchronous support, and community, your child isn't simply taking piano lessons. They're growing the skills they will need to apply in any musical setting.
Partner Lessons — Focused individual guidance within a collaborative learning partnership.
Song’s Studio Sessions — Our signature group experience for singing, rhythm, movement, ensemble playing, music vocabulary, and peer performance.
Learning Library — Lessons, audio, video, and activities that extend learning at home.
Asynchronous Support — Ongoing feedback, accountability, and encouragement between lessons.
Online Community — A place for families to share music, celebrate milestones, and stay connected.
Piano Pathway Schedule
Fall Term Sept 21 - Feb 5 | 12 Lessons + 4 Studio Sessions = 16 classes
Spring Term Feb 8 - June 11 | 12 Lessons + 4 Studio Sessions = 16 classes plus Recital
Ensemble Studio Sessions Mondays at 4:15pm and Thursdays at 4pm
Monthly Sample Schedule
2-3 Partner Lessons
1 Studio Session
Active music-making activities to learn rhythm, songs, rhythm and tonal vocabularies, harmonic functions, reading and notation readiness, and ensemble skills
Peer performancesVideo lessons of learning activities
Home Support - share playing and receive feedback between classes
All partner lessons are held Monday through Thursday and scheduled with Jenie.
Still have questions? Contact Jenie.
Ready to join?
What makes the Piano Pathway unique?
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), students begin their piano journey the way children naturally learn music: to hear and play with understanding. This isn’t just about learning notes — it’s about developing real musicianship, creativity, and lifelong musical thinking.
We sing first, play second.
Your child learns to hear, understand, and think in music before reading it — just like we learn to listen, think, and 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 to learn keyboard geography and beginning with gross-motor movement to support healthy playing technique.
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 in music, create in music, and eventually use the piano as a way to express what they already understand.
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, and you will be contacted about how you can join our music learning community.
“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.
The goal isn't to create children who can simply follow the notes. It’s to develop musicians who can hear what comes next, understand how it works, and make musical choices of their own. When music becomes something they can deeply think, feel, and imagine from the inside, the piano becomes a personal instrument to meaningfully express themselves.
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
The Learning Process
Children already love music.
They hear a song on a show, a favorite artist in the car, Happy Birthday at a party, and they want to sing it, play it, figure it out, and share it with someone. Rather than setting their musical curiosity aside, Piano Pathway builds the understanding required to make sense of what they already love.
Will your child learn pieces? Yes! But the difference is in the learning process. Instead of simply learning how to decode what is written on the page, children need to experience music in a variety of ways in order to truly understand and embody it. Singing, movement, patterns, creating, and collaborative ensemble music-making make up the valuable work of developing musicianship.
These experiences transform the way they hear, think, play, and create music, all the while giving meaning to reading, repertoire, and performance. Instead of always needing a sheet of music or someone to show them exactly what to play, they're gradually gaining the tools to become independent, creative, and confident musicians.
And that is when the music they hear in the world starts becoming the music they can make.
When do they learn to read music?
They will. We just don’t rush it.
Think about how children learn to read language.
Before a child ever learns to decode words on a page, they have spent years hearing language, speaking, understanding words, and developing a vocabulary. Those experiences give meaning to the symbols they eventually learn to read.
While reading music requires significantly more complex coordination and skills, it works in a similar way.
Before asking a child to decode notes on a staff, an MLT-approach develops the musical understanding those symbols represent. Children spend time hearing, singing, moving, recognizing patterns, playing by ear, and developing audiation—the ability to hear and understand music in their minds even when the sound isn't physically present.
Then, when they encounter musical notation, the symbols have something meaningful to connect to. They learn to read and perform music they already understand.
This takes intentional time, but it builds a stronger foundation for reading, playing, creating, and making sense of music independently.
We don't delay music reading. We prepare children with the coordination and understanding it requires.
With Music Moves for Piano, while students will experience exposure to visual symbols and patterns, 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).