Giving guitar lessons for kids is a career path that guitar teachers can consider, aside from giving lessons to adults. Whether you want to start teaching professionally or you are just teaching your own kids to play, there are some important things to understand about the differences between kids and adults when it comes to learning to play guitar. As a guitar teacher you must appreciate that it is difficult for kids to start learning guitar and so must do all you can to make it easier for them. Also appreciate that it can be frustrating and dull, so do all you can to make it fun for them. Guitars come in all shapes and sizes and it can be quite bewildering to someone buying their first guitar. Help them choose the right instrument. Don’t encourage spending too much. It’s worth remembering that they are almost certainly going to want to upgrade after a year anyway. The single most important criteria are: Is the guitar comfortable to hold? As an instructor of the instrument, you know that your career provides opportunities for growth in the form of enhancing playing skills. At an early age, you help your students develop skills that they would use later on in their musical careers. Learning to tune a guitar is actually quite tricky for kids. Asking a child to learn to tune the instrument before they’ve even begun to learn to play isn’t realistic. Instead, learn to tune the guitar yourself, and get in the habit of tuning it daily. Things will sound better, and they’ll want to play more. Ultimately of course, it’s very beneficial for them to learn to tune by ear but, initially it is far more important to make tuning easy.
It is important to realise that students vary quite considerably in terms of how quickly (or indeed slowly) they are able to develop skills or take on board information. It is quite possible (even desirable!) that as a teacher you may feel that during the course of a lesson a particular student might benefit from being introduced to some of the material from what would normally be the next session. It is equally likely (and desirable) that you might spend more than one lesson dealing with a particular chord sequence or fingering exercise. Go for teaching them the simplest possible things first. Since kids have no idea about guitars, start by introducing them to the instrument. Point out the different parts of the guitar and their uses. In order to teach a child to hold the guitar properly, you’ll need to learn to do it yourself first. Once you’re comfortable holding the guitar yourself, you’ll want to try and teach a child to hold the instrument properly. You need to keep reminding them of proper posture occasionally, but not constantly. Remember the initial goal here is to teach them to enjoy the guitar. Over time, most kids will naturally begin holding the guitar properly. When you start lessons with guitar handling and proper body placement also explain the significance of correct body alignment to guitar playing. Help them memorize the correct placement of fingers for every chord. Teach them the association of the chords to musical notes to facilitate note reading. Repetition is a vital part of learning and fortunately, kids are quite often happy to play the same thing again and again. Note that when a kid says they like a particular tune, it almost always means “I am confident I can play this”. Conversely when they say “I don’t like a particular tune” It should be interpreted as: “I find this too difficult for me to play at the moment”. Stress the importance of practice. Kids are naturally temperamental and can be easily impatient or disappointed. Your guitar lessons are good avenues for teaching kids the meaning of perseverance and the value of hard work.
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