Teaching kids to play guitar requires a different approach than for adults. In addition to a different approach, children also need guitar size that fits their body size. In this article we are going to take a brief look at how to choose the right instruments for young students. However, the focus of the article is on different ways how to teach kids to play guitar and some tips that help you to design a child-friendly guitar course.
Choosing the right guitar
There are basically two things you need to consider in order to get the right instrument for a child. First of all, there are different guitar sizes. Second of all, not every guitar type is the best choice for young beginner.
There are basically 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and full size guitars. An instrument that is too big for a child makes it difficult to learn with it. That’s why it’s very important to be sure that your student has got the right guitar size. The right guitar size depends on the age and the height of the child. Check out the following guitar size chart in order to determine the right guitar.
Beside the guitar size there is also the question about the guitar type. First of all, you have the choice between an acoustic and an electric guitar. For a beginner, its preferable to start with an acoustic guitar with nylon strings. They are much easier to play for beginners because they don’t hurt as much as steel strings. That’s why an acoustic guitar with steel string is not a good choice for young kids.
In order to learn more about finding the right guitar for your child, take a look at our ultimate buyer’s guide for kid’s guitars. We have also put together a selection of the best guitars for kids.
How to play guitar for kids
Teaching guitar for kids requires a different approach than for adults. It’s has to be easy and fun. At the same time you have to keep the child motivated. Depending on age and learning style, there are different possibilities how to teach playing the guitar to children. In the following, you find some input for your guitar lessons.
Guitar books for kids
Guitar books can be a great inspiration for your own guitar lessons. Taking a look at the summary and the structure of different books gives you already a good idea how you could design our own child-friendly guitar course. It’s also possible to support your guitar lessons with a book or to recommend it as exercise book at home.
There are a lot of guitar books out there and there are also a few especially written for kids. Here are some examples for good guitar books for kids. For most of them you can already take a look directly at the summary on amazon.
- Alfred’s Kid’s Guitar Course from Ron Manus
- Guitar Adventures for Kids from Damon Ferrante
- My First Guitar form Ben Parker
Teaching material for kids guitar lessons
For a good guitar course you need also some handouts and printables. A handout summarizes the most important things they have learned or includes some exercises to do at home.
On KidsGuitarWorld you can find some teaching materials for your lessons. Get for example guitar chord sheets that are especially designed for kids. Each chord sheet comes with an animal to colour out. Or get a handout that teaches the guitar string names.
Play games with your students
When teaching guitar for kids, you need to enterain your students. It can be quite hard sometimes for young children to keep concentrating. Try to come up with some games, which doesn’t involve any real guitar playing. A memory game can be an excellent game to memorize guitar chords for example.
Our Teaching Materials Ebook includes a memory game with guitar chords that can be printed out.
Easy guitar songs for kids
Only recently, we are building up a little base of easy guitar songs for kids. The aim is to have a place where you can find for popular nursery rhymes the guitar chords, tabs and sheet music as well as some background about the song. For most of them you can download even a PDF with the guitar notes tabs.
Nursery rhymes a great for beginners and young kids because mostly they already know really well the lyrics. In addition to that, many nursery rhymes are easy to learn on guitar.
The following songs are already available on our site: