Piano Keyboard Diagrams to Print OutMusic education? Music resources? A plain paper blank piano keyboard sheet is one of the best all-around tools a music teacher has. Let your piano and guitar students fill in the piano keys themselves.
I use "blank" paper keyboards with all my beginner piano and guitar students. I used to assign kids the entire paper to fill in the first week, but gradually I've come to assign just one note name per week ("This week, I want you to write in all the D's, in pencil"), so that we keep returning to the piano key chart week after week. Below are two very different piano keyboards diagrams: the first one has small keys (uses less ink!), the second one is larger, with fewer keys.
Both print out nicely on 8 1/2" by 11" paper, with plenty of white space left for you to write on!
G = Grandma A = Ants that are hiding in Grandma's house -- probably Carpenter ants! B = the Back door C = the Cat D = the Dog E = the Eagle, or the Elephant F = the Front Door For the first few months of their lessons, they must fill in the piano keyboard paper one key-name per week. The first week they write in all the D's, and the piano players practice a hand exercise to go with it.This exercise, known as "Dipping Donuts," requires shaping the 1 and 3 fingers into a round hole like a donut, then pretending to "dip" it into an imaginary glass of milk, using a smooth wrist action. So, all week long at home, they start their piano practice time by "Dipping Donuts" on all the D's. First one hand, then the other, strikes each D on the piano, from left to right, then back down again right to left (or the other way around -- some free spirit always wants to do it backwards, and it really doesn't matter!). This reinforces not just the piano key's location and name, but also a flexible wrist motion. (This idea comes from FJH's My First Piano Adventure, Lesson Book A Pre-Reading, which is full of cute and effective ideas for beginners.) I frequently have to remind them not to stiff-handedly "splash" the donut into the milk, but gracefully bend the wrist. Over a period of weeks (and months of follow-up), it starts to become natural! It's obvious why piano players need to start learning the names of the keys, but why guitarists? They, too, need to understand the topography of the piano keyboard, on which there seem to be black notes "missing" between B and C, and E and F.
Next, we learn all the names of the other keys. Then, we use the blank keyboard sheet as a reference for saying note names as they play scales fret-by-fret from string to string. ("Open E, F, F#, G, G#...Open A, A#, etc.") I suggest you print out just one at first to see how you like the size. The black keys use a lot of ink, and so these paper keyboards are precious commodities once they are printed out! I don't pass out new ones. If a student rips the holes so the keyboard sheet doesn't stay in their 3-ring binder, then I mend the edge with wide tape folded over, and punch new holes!
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