E aged 3.5 starting out with Soft Mozart

Lee, your daughter is doing so well! I applaud the way you are keeping her motivated! It takes work but is so worth it! Also, the "focus on input not output approach will go a long way to keep her interested in piano & feeling it is on her terms-way to go mom!!!

So, we are still playing around 3-4 times a week

In fact, if I offer E a choice between any other learning activity and piano, she will always choose piano. It is firmly linked to rewards in her mind, but she really does seem to genuinely enjoy playing, which is great to see.

I offer her a lot of choice and involvement in what we play. We have played most of the songs in Introductory Album at least once. But
she has been keen on focussing on Hot Cross Buns lately - and wanting to get the fingers correct. She can now play this using middle, first finger and thumb on the right hand. Because she's quite happy to concentrate on one song, I've been gradually progressing difficulty and helping her to memorise it using RH and LH. And she has even had a go at playing with two hands! This is still really difficult for her but I do see improvement today which was only her second ever attempt (first try yesterday).

What seems to have helped is the taking the fingers for a walk game before playing each time. She plays Do - Sol using every finger of both right and left hand separately (not together yet). This has really improved her confidence in playing using different fingers. I see a major improvement especially in the left hand after doing this exercise for about a week. I think we will be ready to start trying Hanon 1 in another week or so.

She can now make a chord with her left hand. At the moment she likes to use her middle finger on low C rather than little finger - is this OK or should I correct her?

Here are some scores for today - I think a big improvement from when we started:

Guess key - 29 in 28seconds (not really keen on this)
HCB RH1 15/15 t21
HCB L1 21/22 t25
HCB LH1 17/22 t39 (first ever attempt with LH today)
HCB P1 17/37 t86

Oh and she is still singing solfege for most pieces, always when playing R, sometimes also with L. I pay double for singing

So we are continuing to make steady progress

We certainly have ups and downs and face the challenge of keeping a 3 year old (soon to be 4!) motivated, but we keep going and try to play 4 times a week if possible.

Working towards some rewards has been motivating but if I run out of inspiration then she's certainly a lot less keen! We've worked towards a princess fancy dress costume for a party, and a play shopping basket!

I sometimes say she can get two butterflies for improving her score but sometimes this puts her under too much pressure and makes things worse. She's very sensitive to time or other pressure.

We are working on a mixture from the following:

Introductory album (R, L or P)
Nursery primer sight reading (on 4 -she prefers this to 2 - I think it's quite familiar from little musician and she's less likely to guess randomly or thump the keys wildly)
Guess key - only occasionally, not keen
Note alphabet - found using the keyboard too stressful - caused crying so we've stopped for now
Hanon 1 - so far only upwards, she's pretty good with R hand and now starting to work on L hand going upwards (using nail polish on 2nd finger helps a lot), next step is back down again. Does lose cncentration after a while and can't usually manage the whole octave.
Playing chords from Little musician - Do-mi-so, Fa-la-do, So-ti-re with both hands (again nail polish on middle finger helps a lot here)

I have been less good at keeping scores lately (bad mummy!!! ) but I have kept some over the past day or so.

Hot cross buns 15/3/13
L1 21/22 t15
L1 18/22 t12
R1 15/15 t10 (she often plays this by heart without the computer)
R1 12/15 t16 (distracted)
R1 15/15 t9
P1 37/37 t24

French song (very poor focus for some reason on this occasion) 16/3/13
R1 19/28 t53
R1 17/28 t46
L1 18/20 t19
L1 20/20 t14
P - just played the first 6 notes - definitely improving though)

Also, here is a video clip of HCB with singing solfege (after watching this I have raised the seat a little)