Preparation: place your right hand fingers on keys illustrated above. Place your left hand fingers on an area of the keyboard to the left - you won't be playing this song with your left hand, but it makes sense to always keep both hands "ready to play."

Goal: Play each whole note and hold for the duration of 4 beats. Counting should be steady, like the second hand of a clock: "tick tock tick tock etc..." There is no pause in between measures. After you complete count #4, proceed to count #1 with no pause. The "time gap" between each count should be always the same. In other words, it takes exactly the same amount of time to go from count #1 to count #2 as from count #4 to count#1 of the next measure, etc. Play slowly and steadily. Speed (or fast tempo) is not the priority here - playing with the steadiness just mentioned is the priority. Have fun with this! It's your first song - enjoy your progress!

Eye-Opener: Pay close attention to when you are skipping a white key on the piano and when you are playing a key right next to the one you are coming from. Whenever you move directly from a line to another line, or a space to another space, you are skipping a letter name (for example, G to E skips F)

Notes Of Interest: We are playing this song with our right hand.  Contrary to what some beginner pianists are led to believe, G Clef does not refer to what hand we play - it refers to the range we play in. Our goal here includes giving our right hand fingers some practice. It would be quite acceptable to play this melody in this same range with our left hand. This is being mentioned here early in your learning experience so that you are clear on this - staff range does not tell us what hand must necessarily be used in all cases (although it is often more practical to use the right hand for the range of the G Clef).

Ear Training: Once you begin to feel comfortable with this piano lesson and playing this melody (and future melodies on the piano), sing or hum the same notes as you play. This is absolutely wonderful for those musical ears! Take this a step further by playing the above melody, then singing or humming it without playing, making an effort to match the notes exactly! Don't jusdge yourself if you are not accurate - just hve fun with it!

Improvise: Yes, it's only your first song - am I serious? Yes I am! Improvise by playing the same whole notes above for the five measures but change the order of the notes as you play on the keyboard. For example, F D C G E ... G E C D F ... E G D F C ... etc.!

(By now, you've likely figured out that this is not your "average, run-of-the-mill" piano lesson!)