Send your students on a practice quest this summer break!

If you don’t teach lessons or have a lighter schedule in the summer months then you’ll be familiar with this annual quandary: how do I keep my students practising during the break?

My favourite way to tackle this issue is to send my students on a practice quest.

The quest is a list of fun and out-of-the-ordinary practice tasks accompanied by a colour your way to success picture. In this year’s practice quest I’ve chosen a mountain so that students can colour their way up to the peak. 🙂

Practice Quest Tasks

Here are the suggested practice tasks included in the quest:

1. Learn a new piece that you didn’t work on in lessons yet.
2. Play 5 of your favourite pieces that you learnt this year.
3. Learn 3 facts about a famous composer.
4. Practise naming notes using flashcards or an app.
5. Listen to or watch 5 pieces by Debussy.
6. Teach a grown-up one of your favourite pieces.
7. Play all the scales you know so far.
8. Improvise music that sounds like your favourite animal.
9. Teach one of your pieces to a friend.
10. Listen to or watch 3 pieces by Bach.
11. Find 5 music terms in your book that you don’t know, and look up what they mean.
12. Complete 3 pages in your theory workbook.
13. Video record one of your pieces and send it to a friend or family member.
14. Have a Skype concert! Call someone and play for them.
15. Compose a piece about the weather outside.
16. Write a poem and compose a rhythm to match (draw the notes above the words).
17. Listen to or watch 4 pieces by Mozart.
18. Learn a new scale that your teacher hasn’t shown you yet.
19. Try to play the very last piece in your book.
20. Go back and play the first 10 pieces you ever learnt.

Feel free to take this idea and come up with your own tasks that suit your studio.

A Quest for All Occasions

Unlike the 2016 summer quest and 2017 summer quest, I have made no mention in this practice quest to the summer.

This was at the special request of a Vibrant Music Teaching member from New Zealand but I think it will make it more adaptable even if you’re not in that hemisphere. You can use this for any teaching break at all and it should work great.

If you have any trouble with that form please click here to open it in a new window.

How do you keep your students practising during a break?

Tell us what works for you in the comments below or in the Vibrant Music Studio Teachers group on Facebook.