It was jam session time on the keyboard today! And boy did we have fun!!! At first I just sat the keyboard in front of Ashton to let him discover what it would do by himself. With anything Ashton's natural reaction is to reach out and grab the object in his focus and put it in his mouth . . . and the keyboard was no exception! Obviously he hasn't learnt about volume or size comparison yet! But as he reached out and made contact with the keys and the sound came right back to him, a flurry of notes combined together, his eyes opened wide, his back went straight and his hands went banging straight back down in a second attempt to create this bang of sound! You could see all over his body the excitment the keyboard and the sounds he was creating had on him.
I just held him up to the keyboard for what seemed like an eternity (need to work those mummy muscles at bit better I think!) letting him explore the different sounds coming from the different keys. He went up and down the keyboard and on the odd occasion would turn back to look at me and to share the moment with him.
As I saw his interest level start to drop away I re-sparked his interest by changing the sound the notes made to be like a violin. The sound each note made was longer and for lack of a better description "more shrill". But I could see Ashton noticed the difference, as he refocused his attention. I continued to refocus Ashton whenever I saw his attention wavering by introducing a new way of using the keyboard. We explored the backing beats, which really got him jumping around and even playing the keyboard differently. We played the scale over and over, his hand on mine, my hand guiding his fingers, his eyes watching my hand move up and down. We played some simple nursery rhymes or well known children's songs (the extent of my abilities on the piano.) In the end we spent a good 35-40 minutes playing on the keyboard!
Now who said babies have a short attention span! We just need to help them develop it, by refocusing them and keeping learning interesting!
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