As it turns out, having a large group of piano students set up in the children’s section of the Haines borough public library isn’t nearly as loud as it could be.
For the bulk of each of the 30-minute classes, students wear headphones and make soft clacking noises on their 61-key Yamaha keyboards.
Still, the classes are far from quiet. Children’s librarian and teacher Holly Davis circled a group of students on a recent Tuesday afternoon lesson trying to get one-on-one time with each of the children signed up for the class.
Then, she gets everyone’s attention and one by one encourages them to unplug and play what they’re working on for the other students. At the end of each mini-recital, they clap for each other.
Next, the whole group gets up, moves to the floor and plays ear-training bingo, which Davis does by whistling a song until one or more of the kids recognizes it and can mark it down.
It’s all part of Davis’s plan to keep the kids engaged.
“I think it’s good to break it up,” she said. “Especially when they’re starting with the piano. They try really hard and you want to catch them before they get frustrated. [You] do something fun and different and then go back and try again.”
She’s seen 45 kids, and at least one adult, since she started teaching classes in August.
“It [has] been delightful,” Davis said.
She takes younger students in 30-minute blocks starting at 3:30 on Tuesdays. Older and more advanced students attend on Thursdays.
“Everybody can start where they are and then build,” Davis said. “I try to make them feel like they have some creative freedom and then build.”
Kids start out each class putting their headphones on and working on whatever they’d like to play. The response to classes has been overwhelming, she said. At first, she ordered five keyboards and one for herself to teach on.
“But then so many signed up, I thought, OK we can have two groups on Tuesday. Two groups on Thursday. And then I borrowed a couple of keyboards from the school,” she said. A woman came in and dropped one off and now she has enough keyboards that Davis said she has been able to loan a few out to families who don’t have them at home.
“And, I’ve had several parents say they’d like to know what we bought because they want to surprise their children with a keyboard for Christmas,” she said.
Bryndal Sutcliffe watched her stepson Ryan Sutcliffe Diaz play during a recent class. She said Sutcliffe Diaz is a musical kid. He plays the recorder and would like to take up the trumpet some day. For now though, he is really into the piano.
“He practices, like, daily,” she said. “He’s so dedicated.”
Sutcliffe Diaz is a homeschool student and Sutcliffe said the group interaction is important for him.
“He looks forward to it every day,” she said
Sutcliffe called the free classes a great opportunity for children to branch out in a stress-free environment.
“What Holly [Davis] is doing is a blessing for so many parents,” Sutcliffe said.
Davis said part of the inspiration was that Haines has lost a lot of its regular piano teachers. She ticks them off one by one on her fingers. Nancy Nash and Teresa Land retired. “Then Aleta Adkins moved away and so did Rebekah McCoy,” she said. “Stoli Lynch got a job over at the school.”
So, Davis decided to take the leap.
“My mom taught piano lessons for 27 years. So I learned from her,” she said. “I was pretty scared because I never tried teaching piano like that before. I Just tried to pep talk myself: ‘OK. I can teach and I know how to play piano.’”
Anyone curious to hear the fruits of weeks of group practice can visit the holiday open house at the library on Wednesday, Dec. 4. Davis said the students will play from 3 to 4 p.m.
“There will be refreshments and some people will be dressed up,” she said. “And we’ll make it festive.”
After that, there will be a short break. Then lessons will start up again in January and Davis said they’ll go through the end of the school year.