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Piano Teacher & Piano Lessons
in Holland, Wyoming, Grand Rapids, & Rockford, MI
Music is the universal language! Studies have shown that music lessons, learning to read music, and speaking the language of music can train the brain to make new connections and heighten critical thinking, as well as creativity and imagination. People who have received a music education are generally smarter than their non-musical counterparts. Extensive research done in this area has proved that children who learn to play a musical instrument do better in academics.
Shaw, Rauscher, Levine, Wright, Dennis and Newcomb, in their research paper titled Music Training Causes Long-Term Enhancement Of Preschool Children's Spatial-Temporal Reasoning, mention that "a research team exploring the link between music and intelligence reported that music training is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills, the skills necessary for learning math and science."
We now offer beginning piano lessons in your home, or in that of our own piano teacher - Kristin Graef. Kristin has had lifelong experience teaching beginning piano, having been raised in a very musical household, and having studied college-level music theory.
Kristin Graef
Subject Areas: Piano Lessons, K-9 Math, K-12 Language Arts and Social Studies, Writing Test Prep
Kristin is our most "mature" tutor, but like a fine wine, she has gotten better with age. She has a Master's degree in English from Ball State University, and earned her Bachelor's in English at Wittenberg University in Ohio. Kristin has enjoyed lifelong travel in Europe, Canada, and most of the states, and has tutored English to ESL students, both children and adults. As a piano teacher she has taught beginning piano lessons to both children and adults, off and on all her life. She has also tutored privately in math, history, and social studies.
Mostly, though, she teaches essay composition and sometimes Western Humanities at Aquinas College, and has been doing so for fifteen years. She's taught composition also at GVSU and GRCC, and currently at Davenport University. In the summers she has facilitated at SAT essay-writing preparatory workshops, and directed the summer program at Lake Michigan Academy for different learners, grades K to 12. Other supplemental work has included dog walking (Kristin is the Number One Animal Lover of the Universe) and companion for the elderly.
Kristin is diverse in her interests and skills, but in terms of people, she holds a fond place in her heart for children and the elderly, for similar reasons. They are easy to talk to, because they are genuine. She has strong faith in the intelligence of children, and respects them for that. What results is a keen affinity with them, and she uses that to help them learn.
Kristin's favorite things to do are travelling, writing, reading, petting cats, playing games, binge-watching excellent TV with her two grown sons, swimming, and laughing so hard she needs her asthma inhaler.
