Category Archives: Scales

Apr23

How To Rescue Your Piano Lesson When Students and Parents Arrive Upset

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Oh No!

Has this ever happened to you? It’s 3pm and you’re ready to wow your student with the fantastic piano lesson you have carefully planned. You can just imagine the joy on her face when you announce the special song that she will be learning today. You hear a knock on the door, open it and your student walks in with a frown on her face. She won’t speak to you, and when you look at her mom walk in she has a frown on her face too! The mom informs you that the child got in trouble at school and it is clear that the child is guilty as charged.

 At times like this it may seem that there is no hope for redirecting this family so that you can have a great lesson, but the piano teaching genius in you knows better! Now is the time to abandon whatever plans you had prior to the student’s arrival and pay attention to this emergency situation. (Yes, it is an emergency! ) It is up to YOU to turn this situation around for everybody involved.

The guiding principle you will use in this situation is one that was shared recently on the South Florida Orff Blog about how to be a 21st century teacher:

Make it (your lesson) REAL LIFE relevant!

With that said, here are 6 steps you can take to rescue your lesson:

1. Make them laugh!  Your number one goal is to first make everybody in the room laugh as quickly as possible. This will break down any barriers and help them refocus. You could say in a horrified voice something like, “What you just told me makes me hear this music…” (That’s when you go to the piano and play the famous notes of Beethoven’s 5th)

2. Offer a Solution - Your new goal is to get the student to stop worrying about the problem and focus on what she can do to make things better. You can suggest that the two of you write a song about the situation. An apology might be appropriate.

3. Invite The Student To The Piano – You will need to help everybody remember why they came – it’s a piano lesson!

4. Ask questions - Should the song have a happy sound or a sad sound? What kind of scale can we use to make that sound? What words do we need to say in the song?

5. Write It Down - Help your student write out the new song complete with a title. You can take the time to explain some theory concepts like treble clef, bass clef, how to notate melodic and harmonic sounds. Keep it simple and easy though. Even allow the student to just write out the note names.

I Am Sorry Song

6. Take A Picture  – Empower your student to have a better day at school the following day by taking a picture of her holding the “sheet music” for the new song. Tell her that she can print the picture and give it to her teacher the next day. Employ humor once again by allowing her to use fun facial expressions to show how sorry she is about what happened.  Let her choose which picture really shows how she feels.

Can you remember a time when your student and parent showed up to the lesson upset about school? Tell us about it in a comment below!

Apr1

Adding Some Social To Private Piano Lessons

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Who says private lessons have to be lonely lessons? With YouTube and a little creativity, the private lesson can become a great social experience for young students. When students are working on a common goal like learning scales or a certain number of songs each month, etc., they can record quick update/challenge videos to their piano friends. I’ve been doing this with my younger students the past few weeks, and they are getting a kick out of it! They look forward to watching the messages they received from other students and then recording a new message at the end of their lesson. As you can see from the video, the students have really picked up speed in learning their scales for the scales challenge.

How do you use video in your studio? Share your ideas in a comment below!

Mar27

Scary Scales – An Unfortunate Musical Analogy

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Scary Scales

The frenetic scales loop race is heating up in my piano studio! Several weeks ago we began a quest to learn as many scales as we can before the end of the school year. As students have begun to complete the major scales we’ve started learning how to change them into minor scales. To help the kids hear the difference between the two I describe the minor scales as the sad sounding ones or scary ones and the major ones as the happy ones. Well, yesterday after showing a student how to figure out the minor scales on his own

I heard myself say,

“Let’s play some more scary scales”.

I immediately realized that this analogy went against everything I’ve done to try to help kids NOT see scales as scary, evil things!

Oh well, my bad!

Feb15

Update on Scale Links Project

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Don't give up!

This gallery contains 3 photos.

This spring my students are concentrating on learning and perfecting the major scales and pentascales. The younger students are working to learn all 12 pentascales and the older students are tackling the major scales. Their goal is to not only be able to play them fluently but to know the note names for each scale. […]

Feb5

Free “A Major Scale” mp3

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If you’ve been following my last few posts, you know that my students are in the middle of a Scales Links Challenge. To help  them remember the notes for the scales I’ve recorded some original scale songs. You can download the A Major Scale song, “A-A-A I Like To Play” for free here!

Feb4

Learning Scales and Understanding Songs

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Here’s a quick way to help students understand where scales end and how LOTS (most?) of the songs they are learning move:

You wake up in the morning at home and you go to various places throughout the day, but you don’t move in with somebody else at the end of the day – you go back home!

Musical translation #1- when playing your scales you will end on the same note you started with.

Musical translation #2 – Songs often end on their key note. For example if a song is in the key of G Major its last note is typically G.

Jan31

The Difference A U-Turn Can Make In Playing Scales

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u-turn-sign-hi

Some piano students can’t help but play the top note of the scale twice before descending. No matter how many times you tell them not to repeat that note they still repeat it. This happened with one student this week and out of nowhere I said, “Hey make a U-turn once you get to the top.” Now this student definitely does not have a driver’s license – she’s only 6 – but she definitely understood the concept and she did not repeat that top note! You just never know what word or illustration will make it click for a piano student…

 

Apr18

Songwriting Game

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Yesterday I came across a set of balls in my studio like the ones you see at places like Chuck E Cheese where the kids can get in a pit and just have a good time. I had purchased them a while ago knowing that eventually I’d get an idea about how to use them to teach music. Well yesterday was the day the idea finally arrived! SONGWRITING BALLS!

This is an activity that can be done with any instrument, not just piano!

The balls conveniently come in 5 colors. I purchased mine at Wal Mart. Of course in my mind the number 5 screams PENTATONIC SCALE. So, I chose one note of the pentatonic scale for each color. C – red, D – orange, F- blue, G- green, and A-yellow and wrote these one the balls. I made 5 sets of each color.

To play the game (which is really writing a song), place all the balls in a large hat or bag.

Then, using a composing worksheet such as the ones you can find on Susan Paradis’ site, determine how many balls to draw from the bag. You will need one for each note of the song.

Each time a ball is drawn from the bag, write the note name in the appropriate space on the composing worksheet.

Since we are only using the pentatonic scale for this song, any combination should sound nice. You could also specify that the first ball drawn will be the first and last not of the song.

Once you’ve got all the notes written on the worksheet, it’s time to play your new masterpiece!

Extensions – Add lyrics!

Use the G and C balls to demonstrate V-I progression. Add this to the end of your song to show how lots of songs end this way. Have your student play G-C up and               down the chosen instrument.