Giving guitar lessons to a five year old child can be a bit of a balancing act. At this age a teacher needs to "sneak the learning in disguised as fun" as children at this stage of their lives are often not sufficiently developed to fully absorb notions such as the concept of repeatedly practicing a set of motor skills until the movements involved become second nature. 5 year old kids (quite rightly) just want to have as much fun as possible and if playing with a guitar is part of that then thats absolutely fine with them.
To look at the subject of teaching youger kids in greater detail explore our teaching children to play the guitar page which also gives you the opportunity to download a whole range of free guitar teaching resources aimed at the younger player
I will come out and say it right away that as a professional guitar teacher I love teaching young kids to play despite the fact that against all expectations when I was first persuaded to do it teaching younger children might be the part of the job that I enjoy the most I do not generally seek out to work with children around five or six years of age. This is not because kids at this age are incapable of learning to master the rudiments of guitar playing but because regular weekly or fortnightly guitar lessons tend not to work well for kids of this age as they (hopefully) have so much else going on in their lives.
The best way to teach kids at five or six years of age is not with regular timetabled lessons but with short fun sessions that take place whenever a child shows a (sometimes fleeting) interest in making a noise on the guitar. In order to make use of the services of a "regular" guitar teacher for most five year old children parents would have to expect the teacher to live on site and be constantly on call for those moments when a child has become bored with being a dinosaur and is prepared to countenance the idea of banging some strings attached to some bits of wood before going back to being a dinosaur.
Parents (or Grandparents?) who play the guitar can be the perfect facilitators of this kind of experience. What is ideally required at this stage is that when children are playing with a guitar they are being steered towards developing transferrable skills that will be of use to them should they become interested (or obsessed if they're lucky?) with guitar playing as they grow and develop.
What is required is for a child to gradually master a few chord shapes that will allow them to accompany themselves (or their friends and family) on loads of songs. They do not really benefit from earning a whole load of chords (they just forget them and the "fun" is in playing songs. It is also important that from the outset they become used to playing in time with other instruments in order to develop a good sense of rhythm. This element is often overlooked in the early stages and can lead to frustration (not much) further down the line. I would state that a child will be a better guitar player (which will lead to them playing more and becoming further improved) if they can play two chords in time to a drummer and a bass player than if they know twenty chords but can not change between them along to music. If you tour some of the other pages on this site that deal with the subject of teaching younger kids to play the guitar you will see that by mastering the "right" eight chord shapes on a guitar a player could become capable of playing thousands (or even millions- I never tried to count them?) songs or fragments of songs (choruses etc). Familiarising themselves with the easy chord shapes of C, A, G, E, D, Am, Dm, and Em allows anyone (not just children) to operate the guitar in a couple of "guitar friendly" keys (G and A) and opens the door to developing a basic facility on the guitar that will last them a lifetime
This site also has some content that you may care to browse which sets out to answer the question are half sized guitars a good idea for children?
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