Advertorial Guest Post
by Sarah Brown
The youngest (Olive) was in tears. The oldest (Jack) was giving me the silent treatment and the middle child (Max) was, as usual, pretending nothing was wrong to not hurt my feelings (we're working on that).
I should have seen it coming. After all, I never liked doing them growing up either.
In fact, I cried so much that I was able to finally get my parents to cave and quit.
I wish they hadn't, perhaps that's what was driving me to get my children to actually learn and love it, because I regretted missing out.
I'm talking about...piano lessons.
Three piano lessons in fact. One for each of my three kids.
$120 per week worth of in-person lessons.
Their teacher was delightful. This was by no means her fault. She was full of energy, patience and enthusiasm.
My kids, for whatever reason, didn't respond to it.
I thought that hiring her was my only option if I wanted my kids to learn.
Homeschooling them is a full-time job as it is, and I'm not too proud to admit that I don't have the bandwidth to also teach them music.
Friendly reminder...I don't know how to play anyway!
I'm not proud of this, but I couldn't handle it.
It's one thing to push your kids to do something they don't want to do, but when it is a hobby AND expensive relative to our limited budget, I didn't have it in me.
The piano we had purchased, although nothing fancy, sat gathering dust for the next 2 years.
It wasn't one of those beautiful pianos that is just as much a work of art as it is an instrument. It was plain looking and quite frankly, I hated it.
It was a reminder of my second failed attempt at bringing piano into my life.
In December, Tom (my husband) had his entire department relocated from Dallas to Atlanta. The move was exciting but we had to make some decisions. We were going to be downgrading our space a bit.
We decided to move into a smaller house but in a nicer school district, as we do intend to send the kiddos to public school for high school and only homeschool them through the 8th grade.
We decided to move into a smaller house but in a nicer school district, as we do intend to send the kiddos to public school for high school and only homeschool them through the 8th grade.
We went through every large item as if we were on a very tame episode of the show Hoarders.
Keep. Donate. Trash.
Trash. Keep. Keep. Donate...
Then we got to the piano.
"Donate?" Tom asked.
I said yes...I guess so.
But to my absolute surprise and delight, my middle (Max) said, "No! I still want to learn to play that."
I reminded him that we had tried. He promised that he would actually learn as long as I promised one thing...no teachers.
He said he would do anything but didn't want another stranger in the house every week.
Tom and I agreed. We would let him have one more shot at it.
Once we had gotten settled in Atlanta, I asked Max if wanted to go to the local music shop to find some piano books.
He said yes, and we went and grabbed a bunch ones he chose.
I let him go crazy. This felt like a worthwhile investment.
Well, it wasn't.
The books were confusing and hard to follow.
But I didn't want to give up.
I went into google and typed, "best way to learn piano without a teacher"
Typically, I scroll past the ads, but this time, I clicked on the first one. It was for an app called "Simply Piano."
I was hesitant at first.
We aren't super tech savvy and have been burnt in the past by things that claim to be simple and easy that turned out to be so confusing, I questioned the true value of my Masters degree
I assumed that we'd need to connect the app to a computer or something to make it work.
Nope. We didn't need to do any of that.
Simply Piano worked using nothing but our family iPad and the electric piano that we almost donated.
Flash forward to today and Max is all the way into the "Intermediate II" phase of the app.
It has a schedule that goes off 4 times each week reminding him to get his lesson in.
Only Max actually ended up gravitating back to the piano.
Jack actually picked up guitar and Olive got into drawing.
The beautiful part...those were included in our $14.99/month payment!
Honestly, I don't usually write promotional sounding articles like this, but I am just such a fan of Simply Piano that I felt I had to share my story.
This app is worth every penny.
The also have a free 30 day trial so you can play around with it and see if your kids like it as much as mine did!
Now, my husband I have a "no pictures of the kids rule" but I had to sneak in a few pics of them practicing.
Forgive the weird blurring 
Click here to check out Simply Piano
Just a heads up, there is only one subscription plan, so you don't have to pay extra to get the guitar, singing and drawing apps.
There are actually 5 users allowed on each plan.
Maybe I'll finally learn how to play piano after all 
Guest Author
Sarah Brown is a homeschooling mom of three who loves creating hands-on learning experiences and fostering a love for education at home. With a background in elementary education, she blends structure with creativity to make learning fun. When she’s not teaching, she enjoys coffee, good books, and exploring nature with her kids.
