Monster Spray and Imagery for Piano Motivation

My 6 year old daughter, Chloe, loves playing piano and plays it almost daily. But I noticed that in the last few days, she only played her old songs and were improvising some new ones … which is great, but she wasn’t willing to learn anything new.

As I wanted to keep the momentum going, here is how I motivated her to learn a new song:

The next piano song to learn in our music book is called ‘Lavender Mood’. I asked Chloe to sit at the piano next to me and to picture what this music could be about.

“I don’t know,” said Chloe.  

“Ok, picture a beautiful sunny day and a big, green field covered with purple lavender flowers.” I said as I showed her how the lavender flowers look like on a picture in my phone. “And now imagine there is a piano in the middle of this field and you are sitting at that piano. And next to you, is William! (the boy she really likes). How would you play this music piece now?”

Chloe’s eyes widened with delight and became dreamy … And then she shrugged: “I’m too shy to play it for William, can I play it for you?”

“Oh! I’d love to hear it…”

But Chloe still sat there lost in her dreams…

“Oh and by the way,” I remembered, “I happened to have a Monster Mist Lavender Spray* in the kitchen. Would you like to see what these flowers smell like?” It was a pure co-incidence and totally unplanned for, but the lavender spray bottle was really 3 feet away from me and I thought of it last minute to spice things up. Why not?

Thirty seconds later, I sprayed our piano area with the Lavender scent and it felt magical. Now we could really picture that beautiful field on a sunny day filled with relaxing aroma.

And off Chloe went, playing each and single piano note with love and care. She did not rush through it like she does a lot of the time; she just focused and played the music … her mind swept away by the beautiful imagery and aroma.

It was one of my favourite inspirational piano teaching moments.

*A while ago I made this Monster Spray by putting water and a few drops of Lavender essential oil into a small spray bottle to …well … ward off scary monsters in our house. The bottle comes in handy every now and then 😊