Select Special Needs Testimonials For Piano Wizard Academy
Autism 4 Music – Spontaneous testimonial from a special needs family how Piano Wizard changed their family’s life for the better.
More Autism
Another non-verbal autism spectrum boy, Minh, who I called to catch up with today. Her computer broke down, so he hasn’t played in years, we are sending her our online version and I will help her get it set up for him. In the meantime, she became a special needs
“I learned about the program about a year ago and decided that I wanted it for my special needs son now 11. He got it for his 11th birthday, but little did I know that deep within my heart, I wanted it for me too, to fulfill a dream I have had since I was a little girl, that I always wanted to play piano. Having grown up in a little village where the only musical instrument was an old church organ that I could only touch twice…on my way into the church and on my way out….each Sunday I yearned for that moment just to touch it. As the hymns were being played, I would close my eyes and imagine that those were my fingers making such beautiful music.
I have made it my goal to learn it alongside my son. I have played by ear, I have played some chords, but this is real step-by-step teaching that I know both of us can accomplish so much together even as we bond in a way that doctors thought was impossible. My son responds to music, and he responds to his mother’s voice. More to come, I hope to share videos and more. But thanks, this has been a life-changing experience even though just a few days old, needs to be celebrated… day after day.”
-Martha Nguyen
The reason for this testimonial started with a customer support request via text. Martha was (like my wife) a bit computer-phobic, and having trouble setting up the game, and somehow ended up in a text exchange with my wife late one Sunday night. My wife sympathized, and I set up a call with her the next day, spending hours with her (“What is right click?”) to help her find her CD on her computer, get installed, and set up, then I walked her through the first tutorials. She was thrilled and couldn’t wait to try it on her son.
Here is a screenshot of their text exchange during the first month of Minh playing the game. Here are links to the shared videos in the pdf above. Minh, after 1 month, learned a song well enough to join with other ASD students and perform for Autism Month event presentation.
Try not to cry, here is Ariana Faith, born with disfigured arms and legs, playing her first song on PW.
“Arianna at Christmas. Here she is playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ for the first time with the Piano Wizard… She has had less than 45 minutes playing the Piano Wizard. This is a very cool product, and she is very excited to be able to create music. It’s amazing that someone who has very limited mobility is able to play a musical instrument so quickly and easily.”
Here is a mom born without arms and legs sharing how she was able to PLAY and teach her son to play and bond with him in a different way.
“I have exposed over 80 of the elementary and middle school aged students to Piano Wizard Academy, and it has been received with great enthusiasm… The population of this school is very diverse and encapsulates a wide range of disabilities and abilities, as well as cognitive levels…
Many of these students are diagnosed with some form of Autism, and they all are greatly enjoying playing with this program. Four of my male students diagnosed with Autism obtained a perfect score the first day they played Piano Wizard Academy, with a fifth young man reaching a score of 90% the first day.”
Dyslexia
One of the very first spontaneous parent testimonials we ever got was from the mother of 2 girls who had participated in our very first experimental Piano Wizard Academy, where we worked on developing our unique 100-song curriculum that would work best with the game.
Afterwards we gathered feedback, and she confided in us that her 7-year-old had (had?) dyslexia, and it had begun to impact her self-esteem and school work in very negative ways, especially since her 4-year-old sister was reading as well as or better than her. She shared that somehow in the 4 months we had done the Piano Wizard Academy not only had she learned to play about 30 songs, but her dyslexia seemed to be much better, and that she was now reading at grade level and slightly above. She was in tears because she had been so worried about her daughter, but we were very (pleasantly) surprised, and frankly baffled. This was years before we launched the program into the home school market and began to get spontaneous testimonials from other special needs families.
We have hundreds of reviews and testimonials, including substantial numbers of a variety of special needs parents.
For even more, just Google “Piano Wizard Academy videos, reviews, testimonials, awards“.
But my core insight and strength was designing something that even toddlers could play. This was originally targeted for pre-K due to my interest in creating something emulating a native language acquisition learning approach (i.e., we learn to speak first, then read words we already know, then learn grammar. In traditional piano lessons, that process is painfully and inefficiently inverted, i.e., we need to learn “rules” (music theory) to be able to decipher (read?) music notation, and only then can we “play”. This is often the approach of learning a second language, focusing on parts of speech, conjugation, syntax, and memorization of vocabulary in arbitrary sentence constructs, so we can “speak”.
“We have had Piano Wizard for about a month. The first two weeks he mostly banged the keys, but after watching his siblings play, something clicked and he’s playing on rhythm, even with the right fingering. Don’t ask me why he’s in a duck costume. We are loving Piano Wizard. :)”
You may still assume they cannot learn to actually play piano, let alone read music at these ages, but in fact, they quickly go way beyond what we ever hoped for.
This one is long, she goes through a few songs reading from the sheet music.
“We officially started with Piano Wizard software the first week of May 2013. Since then, Lia has learned 20 songs! I chose 6 and had her play them for her recital. I did not have her pre-run through them, or over-drill her beforehand because she is still young (age 4.5) and I figured she knew the songs while she was going through the program and that is enough. I would make sure she scored 100% on a regular basis before moving on and then that was it. Today was about having a fun recital and a party afterwards. Getting dressed up and playing for a camera and preforming for family is enough of a task for a four-year-old. I just wanted her to follow through and have a good experience because this won’t be her last recital.”
Here is a testimonial from a senior adult about how he has always wanted to learn.
We want to be like Legos or Crayola, a kind of DuoLingo but for music, a simple but profound enabler of creativity, and cognitive development.
If you went through this, thank you so much for your precious time and attention.
Chris@musicwizard.com, 813-505-2995 (WhatsApp/Text/Cell) www.calendly.com/MusicWizard