Easy Piano Songs for Kids

Which piano songs do kids consider easy enough to play and enjoy? And why hasn't this list changed for decades? You'll find the reason has as much to do with familiarity as it does with difficulty.
Kids rarely want to play music that isn't familiar to them. Even the best song, presented with verve and gusto by the teacher, will likely produce a scowl on a child's face if they haven't heard it before, somewhere. This is especially true with younger children.
This actually presents great difficulties for piano teachers, who find their repertoire limited by what the child can recognize.
And some kids have heard almost nothing, so this can be a chore. Or, if they have a wider listening experience, they might like songs that are entirely too hard to play.
For example, take Taylor Swift. Almost all kids have heard these songs and they sound deceptively simple. But they are notoriously difficult for smaller children to play because of their rhythmic complexity: try as they might, it is very hard for a kid to make Taylor Swift sound like Taylor Swift for more than a few measures.
But if we are dealing with younger kids, here are the songs they will most likely recognize, and be able to play:
JINGLE BELLS, MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB, LONDON BRIDGE, CHOPSTICKS, WHEELS ON THE BUS and OLD MACDONALD are at the top of the list because they contain only white keys.
As soon as black keys are included in the song, the difficulty rises exponentially in the child's mind. In my experience, kids watch your hands when you demonstrate the song, and calculate mentally the difficulties. If it seems too hard, they will refuse even if they love the music.
Here's a list of songs that have black keys but may be negotiable for kids:
FUR ELISE (Beethoven)DECK THE HALLS, STAR SPANGLED BANNER and TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME.
Christmas songs have a high percentage of "all white key" layouts, so they are a valuable piano teacher resource. If you celebrate Hanukkah instead, try THE DRAYDL SONG.
The three factors that determine whether a child will accept the song are:
1. Familiarity
2. Mostly white keys, if not all white keys
3. Mostly adjacent notes: kids have difficulty keeping track of songs that leap all over the keyboard, like BLUE DANUBE.
Another strategy is to simplify and shorten songs that the child finds familiar. The opening bars of BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH SYMPHONY are likely to be familiar to a child, but you will need to simplify it to a single line, and perhaps transpose it to all white keys.
You haven't seen delight until you've watched a child decide, "I can play that song!"

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