Children's Notebook (Russian: Детская тетрадь, romanized: Detskaya tetrad), also known as A Child's Exercise Book,[1] Op.

Shostakovich intended it for his daughter, Galina, who at the time was a young child beginning her piano studies.

Originally envisioned as a cycle of twenty-four pieces in all keys arranged along a circle of fifths, the completed work ultimately contained only seven.

Galina was to have played the premiere in Moscow in 1945, but a memory lapse led to her father completing the performance.

In 1947, during the Prague Spring Festival, he played the work's first integral performance, which was recorded for broadcast, and subsequently issued commercially.

The impetus for the creation of the Children's Notebook was personal: it was intended for his daughter, Galina, who in 1944 was eight years old and commencing piano lessons.

[15] The manuscripts for Children's Notebook attest to the occasional difficulty that Shostakovich had in keeping track of his own opus numbers.

[18] Vladimir Delson, who authored a monograph on Shostakovich's piano music, called the Children's Notebook a didactic work that could be compared with those of Goedicke, Alexander Gretchaninov, and Dmitri Kabalevsky, but does not imitate them.

[19] David Fanning said that the predominant quality of Shostakovich's recording of Children's Notebook was "throwaway impatience".

He speculated that the rapid tempi and the cut in "Birthday" that the composer observed may have been made to accommodate the work on a single side of a 78 RPM record.