Walking the Dog for Piano/Keyboard

This playful G major piece in 6/8 helps students adapt their finger positions quickly from being splayed apart to play the eighth note/quaver arpeggio passages to being close together with fingers curved for the sixteenth/semiquaver sections.

Before playing this piece, some hand exercises away from the piano are useful to help the student see how their hands flatten out with straight fingers to play wide-apart notes such as arpeggios, and then cluster together with curved fingers for close-together notes such as scales. 

Left hand/right hand pairing of quavers with semiquavers (eighth and sixteenth notes) and vice versa is another skill-set written into this piece.

Learning how to listen to hear how the left and right hands need to sound exactly together in time with the beat established in the first bar/measure provides another teacher/student chat learning topic. Not getting faster or slower is an associated step in this active listening skill while playing.

Click here to see a sample page and hear the whole piece.