Chris Kjorness is a musician and instructional designer with over twenty years of experience teaching and designing learning experiences for students from Kindergarten to College. He holds a Master’s in Music from the New England Conservatory and a Master’s in Teaching and Curriculum from Michigan State University.
I taught myself to play the guitar when I was eleven. To be fair, I was the son of a music teacher and had years of piano and cello lessons before that. In a fit of boredom one summer day, I grabbed my mother’s guitar and a guitar book for beginners and got down to work. By the end of the summer I was impressing all of my friends doing my best Eddy Van Halen impressions on acoustic guitar.
Easy, right? Not quite!
It wasn't until I was teaching that I realized how hard it is to learn- and teach- guitar to true beginners. I couldn't understand what was going wrong. I used the same book I learned on, and taught my students all the right things to do, but in the end they were bored and stuck.
The hardest part of learning guitar is the very beginning, when kids are learning the fundamentals. Guitar is fun, instantly gratifying, and great at parties, but if a kid is stuck for too long trying to get the string to stay down, they're going to give up.
Awesome Guitar for Kids is a comprehensive, field-tested, program to teach children the foundations of playing the guitar without killing their love for this awesome instrument.
We use widely regarded best-practices for teaching and learning to present a series of lessons kids will not only learn from, they will enjoy!
The method works great for beginning guitar lessons with a professional teacher, but it also includes resources for parents who- let's face it- end up being the teacher for the other 6 days of the week, anyway. Adventurous parents can even try this method as a warm up to the start of professional lessons- we promise, you can do it!
We created AG4K to share the love of guitar and music with our kids. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
With Gratitude,
Chris K.
Easy, right? Not quite!
It wasn't until I was teaching that I realized how hard it is to learn- and teach- guitar to true beginners. I couldn't understand what was going wrong. I used the same book I learned on, and taught my students all the right things to do, but in the end they were bored and stuck.
The hardest part of learning guitar is the very beginning, when kids are learning the fundamentals. Guitar is fun, instantly gratifying, and great at parties, but if a kid is stuck for too long trying to get the string to stay down, they're going to give up.
Awesome Guitar for Kids is a comprehensive, field-tested, program to teach children the foundations of playing the guitar without killing their love for this awesome instrument.
We use widely regarded best-practices for teaching and learning to present a series of lessons kids will not only learn from, they will enjoy!
The method works great for beginning guitar lessons with a professional teacher, but it also includes resources for parents who- let's face it- end up being the teacher for the other 6 days of the week, anyway. Adventurous parents can even try this method as a warm up to the start of professional lessons- we promise, you can do it!
We created AG4K to share the love of guitar and music with our kids. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
With Gratitude,
Chris K.