After introducing the basic pentascales and major/minor chords by rote in the first few months of lessons students can see the practical application of chords as they play the accompanist role and play left hand chords while they sing along to familiar songs or play duets with me as I play the melody line for songs like Heart and Soul, Canon in D or Zootopia's 'Try Everything.' We also explore inverting chords into the more easily reached familiar I-IV64- I-V6-I chord progression.Īt the Creative Keys Baroque Edutainment session, Leila Viss demonstrated how students can improvise together by borrowing famous progressions and having one student play the paint strip chords on the left side of the piano (blocked, broken or in a style of their choice) while another student picks a note of their choice from each paint strip to form a melody. Introducing chords using these paint strips allows me to start even young beginners off with a solid chord foundation much sooner than if they were limited to only playing chords using the notes on the staff they can read.