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Kinderbach

Friday, January 2, 2009 Leave a Comment

From the website: KinderBach is preschool piano lessons, music for young children at their level of understanding. KinderBach presents music using the piano keyboard as the base instrument to maximize the beneficial effects on the growth and development of young kids. Children should love to learn an instrument and KinderBach makes the learning fun.

KinderBach was interested in having the whole TOSCrew review their product. I did not quite fit into the category of reviewing this, as I don't have a preschool child at home, and I don't have access to a keyboard either. So I e-mailed my sister who has a little guy at home that just loves music, and told her to try it out. So she did and this is what she had to say:

KinderBach is broken into levels. Each level has a number of weeks and each week has four sessions. My son is two, and he is definitely not ready for this, probably he would not even be ready at age three. He would never sit through the four sessions each week (even if we broke them up to one a night) he would be bored. It is just a lot of watching a video and "maybe" doing an activity sheet. Honestly, I wouldn't use this program at all. Although we know repetition is how we learn, this was overkill. I got up to week 24 and we still were not really using a piano or keyboard yet (maybe twice, three times over the 24 weeks were the kids asked to play notes on the piano).

I think kids who really do want to learn piano would get frustrated with the fact that they are not "playing" the piano.

A really good thing about this program is that if focuses a lot on the theory end of music. However, I feel you need to get the kids excited about playing and need to work the theory in with the playing, which I find this program does not do.

For some reason I was also unable to view any of the lessons in Level 4 and up.

Based on what I viewed I would not recommend this to parents interested in teaching their children piano.

Thanks Sis, for taking the time to review this for me.

Perhaps this program is better suited for an ages 4 and up (which then I would not describe it as being "preschool" that says to me anything from ages 2 onward). In any case, we all have different opinions on products and that is the beauty that is the TOSCrew. Please go check out that site, and read up what other homeschool families have said about this program, perhaps you will find it up your alley after all! The first sessions can be obtained at no cost at the Kinderbach website, so you can try it out for yourself too.

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