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!

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!

Handouts for the Pop/Jazz Track at MTNA 2013

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EVERY DAY in lessons my students show me that the music they are most interested in is Pop and Jazz. As teachers we have to listen when students tell us what they want to learn and find ways to use what we know to help them get to where they want to go. Awesome article by Leila Viss of 88pianokeys.com. Check it out!

88pianokeys's avatar88pianokeys

photo (5) 2 Hello Jazz/Pop Track attendees and those who couldn’t attend but are still interested,

First, a huge thank you! We (Bradley Sowash, Chair and all those involved) were so pleased with the number of those who participated and the enthusiasm and energy felt throughout the day.

Here’s bios and descriptions of each session and as promised, handouts from those who offered them.

Panel Discussion: Can you think of Pop 10 Reasons for Integrating Jazz/Pop styles into your Lessons?

Panel’s HANDOUT: None, but stay tuned for the top 10 list of each panelist in a future blog.

Bradley Sowash, Scott Houston, Barbara Kreader, Lauren Thompson, Kristin Yost, Marti Dudgeon, Leila Viss, Deborah How

Dialogue between and panelists and attendees discussing the pros and cons of integrating jazz/pop styles into music lessons. Attendees will be encouraged to make a list of the POP 10 reasons why to consider adding jazz/pop into daily…

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Quick Way To Learn A New Song

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Quick Way To Learn A Song

What You Will Need:

2 or more piano students (upper elementary and older)

A song that these students like to listen to a lot

1 Die (small is fine, but GIANT is more exciting)

2 Pianos

What You Do:

Teach each student individually how to play the song by rote. (Most likely you will just teach the chorus or a popular riff in the song). You can even have the 1st student help you show the 2nd student how the song goes

Have each student go to a piano

Have each student pick a number from 1-6 and whisper it in your ear

Roll the die until one of the numbers comes up. That is the student who will play first.

The first student plays. As soon as he makes a mistake he must immediately stop playing. Now it is the other student’s turn.

They continue to take turns until someone plays it through with no mistakes. That person receives a point. If they both play it correctly, they both get a point.

 The first person to get 3 points is the winner

Why This Works for the Students:

This formula works because of 2 key ingredients: A song the students like and the friendly competition. Being the first to correctly play a song that you and your friends love significantly raises a  student’s level of cool!

Why This Works for the Teacher:

Students will be practicing without even realizing it!

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This is priceless.

shortgrain's avatarRegarding Music

This is an interesting article on the value of teaching music in public schools from a non-musician. The author talks about how his lack of understanding in music frustrates him and how he sees his daughter’s music teacher bring understanding to her students.

And so I find myself sitting in a music classroom of a local high school waiting for my daughter to perform. There’s another young woman seated at the piano when I sit down and I am reminded that for many students, middle school is a time of painful awkwardness…. She begins playing and I close my eyes and give my imagination to the music…and it’s beautiful. Vulgarian that I am, I even recognize it as a piece that I’ve heard before. I open my eyes and thoughts of awkwardness are gone. At the piano sits a young musician – one who just took me to a place…

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Easy Piano Lesson Plan

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Piano Lesson Plan

My version of How To Teach Piano In 84 seconds by Andrea Dow of the Teach Piano Today blog. Here’s how you can make it and use it in your lesson with students who have short attention spans:

1.Write out 6 activities on jumbo popsicle sticks and put a strip of flat magnetic tape on the back of each stick. (The magnetic tape sold in rolls does not work as well as the flat kind)

2.After each activity the student and I will sing the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it theme” before moving to the next activity.

3.Be sure to read each activity with the student before having them do it.

4. Get creative with the activities! You will notice that my 3rd “activity” is “Quick! Hit the panic button”. If you don’t have a panic button, do something like bounce a ball.

5. Notice that some activities are timed. You can draw a clock on these so students will know the activity is timed.

6. Finally, decide what order you want to do the activities in – or let your student choose – and put the magnets on a magnetic board!

That’s it – lesson accomplished!

Balloons In The Piano Room

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Music Balloons

Quick and fun theory review!

At our practice achievement celebrations this week, I drew music theory concepts on balloons and had students randomly pick 2-3 balloons. I told them that if they could correctly identify what was on the balloon, they could pop the balloon. If they correctly identified all 3 of them then they also got the joy of taking a purple balloon home with them.

I got the idea for this activity while reading Ron Clark’s book, The End of Molasses Classes. It is an AWESOME read!

I used different variations of the activity also.

Sight Reading Balloon

Sight Reading

Note Identification

Note Identification

Finally, my favorite variation – In Family Feud Style I gave 2 students each a blank balloon. I sat them in chairs back to back and told them they had 20 seconds to draw as many music symbols as they could think of on the balloon. Whoever had the most would get to pop the balloons.

They had a blast with it!

symbols