Blog

SUMMER PIANO PRACTICE

6/19/2024

We are on break for 3 weeks after a very successful piano year. Yay! Summer class begin mid-July, but about half of our students take a break from piano classes over the summer.

For the younger students, telling them to "play the piano throughout the summer" has better results if they have some way of logging their practice.

This is a practice log chart for our primer/level 1 students. Feel free to download it and use it with your students too!

Woofs VS Meows

1/20/2024

Our Little Mozarts group students recently completed Book 1. Before moving on to book 2, we have spent some time reviewing the material from Book 1. To make it fun, we came up with the Woofs Vs Meows game.

The students are split into 2 teams - the Woofs and the Meows - and each team member earns points for their team by completing challenges. We use the DECIDE NOW app, and students spin the wheel to see what their challenge is. For Book 1, the challenges are:

to play a specific song from the book
to find given keys on the piano (e.g. "Play all the "A" keys on the piano)
to name the symbols on a number of the orange Little Mozart flashcards

Woofs Meows takes up the whole 40-minute lesson, but it has everyone paying careful attention, and it's a fantastic way to review music symbols and pieces that haven't been played for a while.

PRACTICE LOG

1/15/2024

Last week I gave out these practice logs to the students.
I've tried them in the past without much success.

This time, I have asked the parents to initial the practice days rather than have the students check the days off themselves. It's been a neat way to keep parents involved with practice. Also, the fact that five or more practice days earns 3 Chick-Fil-A Piano Points has been a big motivator! Several students had 6 or 7 days signed off and I could actually hear in their playing that they had practiced all week. Yay!

Click on the image to download the practice log if you'd like to use it in your own studio.

Chick-Fil-A challenge

1/3/2024

This piano year, we have been running a Chick-Fil-A practice incentive. It is our most motivating incentive so far!

Students earn "Chick-Fil-A" practice points for playing at recitals, starting a new book, performing their memory pieces, showing up to the lesson with all their books etc. The first 4 students to reach 100 points each win a $10 Chick-Fil-A gift card. Before Christmas, we had 4 winners, and they were all excited to get their gift cards in the mail.

This week we started a new Chick-Fil-A Practice Challenge. This time, students get to choose from ColdStone Creamery, Chipotle or Chick-Fil-A gift cards (but we're still calling in the Chick-Fil-A challenge because the students get super excited about the prospect of getting Chick-Fil-A).

I even made some cut little "chick" stickers to log their progress on the charts this time. I'll make some ice-cream stickers this weekend if I have time. That will keep the ice-cream lovers motivated!

Download the chart and edit it to fit your studio. Choose your own criteria for points. We take new students year-round, so we only wanted the challenge to last 3 or 4 months so that new students can take part without being behind those that were in lessons at the start of the year. With our criteria, we expect to have our 4 winners by Easter and then we'll start again in April.

You can also download the "Congratulations" cards to attach to the gift cards.

You can use any stickers to log progress. Last time we used star stickers from the store. If you want to use our new "chick" stickers, you can get them from our Etsy Store.

Note Ninjas Escape Room

2/19/2023

Yesterday we had our note learning event! We made it a kind of Escape Room - so the students had to work together to find the code to unlock the box of goodies.

Most of our students are online, so it was great for them to actually be in-person with the students from their online groups.

Ten students attended and 3 of our teen students came to help out and man our 3 Note Drill stations:

iPad Note Drills (using the Flash Note Derby and Piano Notes Fun apps)
Worksheet Note Drills (writing note names beneath the notes)
Note Puzzle Note Drills (a puzzle to match the staff note to its alphabet name)

There were so many other activities that we could have included, but we had just one hour, and we didn’t want to add too many activities and run out of time. The main thing was for the activities to be very different from each other to keep the students focused and interested.

The students were arranged into 3 teams:

Rockin’ Reds
Sunny Superstars
Green Machine

The teams had 15 minutes at each station (which definitely wasn’t enough - next time we will make the event longer).

At each station, all students in the team had a given number of note-learning challenges to complete in order for the team to earn a musical clue. (The clues weren't actually related to the note-learning activities, but they were based on music theory).

They then had to work together to decipher the clue and write the answers on their “Clue Calculator” sheet.

On completion of their Clue Calculator sheets each of the teams ended with a single digit number. Those 3 digits were the combination to the lock on the box of goodies that they took home with them.

The kiddos were super excited putting their digits into the lock, and delighted when the lock finally opened, and they could grab the goodie bags from the box.

Our Ninja Prize Box

It was such a fun event! We got such good feedback from the parents, and it was encouraging seeing the students' scores improve on each repetition of the activities. We will definitely be doing another "Escape Room" again.

MUSIC SYMBOL CHARTS

1/29/2023

I gave some of our Little Mozarts students a quiz on music symbols this past weekend. They didn't all do as well as I had expected, so I put together these short music symbol charts for them. We will try the quiz again in a couple of weeks.

Click the image to download them to use with your students if you think they will be useful for your studio.

Score Study - New Song Prep

12/28/2022

So many students dive into a new piece without looking through it first. This coming term, I will be doing score studies with the Little Mozart students. I'm calling it New Song Prep, and we will be doing it for each piece in the books from now on. Having a formalized structure like this should get them into the habit for the future.

If you think it would be useful for your classes, please feel free to download it and use it. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improving it.

Christmas Recital For Beginners

12/26/2022

After 2.5 years online, we went back to partial in-person lessons in September, and we started 4 beginner group classes for our Music for Little Mozarts program. In December, some of these students had their first piano recital using the Music for Little Mozarts Recital Story Book. The parents were thrilled that even the students who only started in November were able to take part in the recital.

The Recital Story Book is great because it follows the progress of the Lesson Book, so any student working through the Lesson Book can play pieces from the Recital Story Book. I read a cut down version of the story and the students sang and played the songs. One of the older students played the accompaniment parts, and I encouraged (bribed) the students to sing along by letting them know the goody bags and stickers were only for those I heard singing :)

It was so much fun that we are starting our 5th Little Mozarts group class next week! Yay!

A Cute Christmas Gift

10/20/2022

In September a whole bunch of new kiddos signed up for lesson with us. It has been a delight teaching them. This Christmas we are planning a mini-recital during the last lesson of the year, and we put together cute sticker/candy packs with encouraging greeting cards for each student to collect after the recital.

The stickers and cards are available on the Piano Together Etsy Store.
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Piano Stickers Galore

8/12/2022

Students love stickers.

Piano students love piano stickers.

This year, we're finally returning to in-person lessons for new students, and we have made personalized stickers for them to put on their folders and music books. We'll also be adding stickers to the Piano Packs that we mail to online students.

This summer, we tested different styles of stickers on some of our summer students. They were such a big hit - even some of the older teens (14, 15, 16 year olds) were delighted with them, so we are making them available to others on the Piano Together Etsy Store.

Our stickers come in sets of 8 or 16, and you can personalize each sticker in the set. For example, if you have 16 students, just select the style you want, enter the student names, and we'll set you 16 personalized stickers. I'm sure your student will love them just as much as ours do!

All stickers are 25% off through August 31. Yay!

Julia & Diana

Two sisters on two different continents, working together, creating resources that keep our students motivated and loving piano!

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Photos from wuestenigel (CC BY 2.0), Phil Roeder, gitsul., torbakhopper, University of the Fraser Valley, 401(K) 2013, wuestenigel