Do you have trouble fitting music history into your lessons? It can be hard to cram in yet another thing…but our students need some music history knowledge to put their repertoire into context. In this post, I gave you 9 ways to teach music history to piano students but I want to add one more…
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3 Ideas for Helping Piano Students with Right/Left Coordination
One of the beginning concepts that can trip young piano students up is right/left coordination. If they don’t know which hand is playing (or which hand is right/left in the first place!) they can feel a bit lost. > Many method books (such as my favourite: Piano Safari) start out with piece (or at least…
Exploring Scales and the Circle of Fifths with Improvisation
Improvisation is one of the best ways to teach students about keys, scales and chord patterns. In fact, I believe in teaching scales through improvisation first – before fingering, before metronomes, before checklists. Let me show you how I do it. It was years into practising scales when I finally understood what they were for….
Leave September Forgetfulness Behind with this Piano Game
Have any of your students gone a huge step backwards over the summer? A piano game is a great way to bring students up to speed. Most of the time the knowledge is still there. It just has to be brought up out of the archives. 😉 The game I’m sharing with you today provides…
9 Fun Ways to Teach Music History to Piano Students
Are you looking for fun ways to teach music history to piano students? Trying to integrate music history into games or activities so that your students get a rich well-rounded music education? I’ve got you covered. There are so many different aspects of music that we need to teach. Music history tends to be one…
How Visual Piano Lesson Plans Can Improve Piano Student Attention
Do you ever struggle to capture piano student attention? Do students sometimes ask you how long is left, or do you find yourself getting less done in each lesson than you think you should? Visual piano lesson plans could be the answer. The benefit of having a visual piano lesson plan is that students know…
How to Use Games as a Travelling Piano Teacher
Using games as a travelling piano teacher can be a little cumbersome. You can’t exactly have a whole library of games and off-the-bench activities at your disposal on the road… Can travelling piano teachers even use games at all? I used to travel to students’ houses to teach for many years so trust me, I…
Creating Piano Practice Pros Part 4: The 3 Levels of Piano Practice
We all know that there’s practice, and then there’s practice. What many students think of as practice is actually just playing. They play each piece from start to finish, maybe a couple of times, then they call it a day. That’s not really practice. It’s basically a humongous waste of their time. Sure, they’ll eventually…
Creating Piano Practice Pros Part 3: What to do when you’ve tried it all
As we dive deep into piano practice this month, I wanted to answer the question that’s on everyone’s minds: what do we do when nothing works? What’s the magic solution when a kid just will not practice? Ha, if only right? If there actually was a magic practice wand, I’m sure the teacher who invented…
Creating Piano Practice Pros Part 2: Home Practice Instruments
Does this story sound familiar? A student is struggling with technique, they’re clearly not practising enough and for some reason, they keep getting lost looking for middle C…months into lessons! You try everything. You play games, you colour code, you connect what they’re doing to their favourite TV series and, nothing. Then you see a…
