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You are here: Home / Practice / Student will Stick to the Practice Plan with Practice Steps Stickers

30th October 2016 By Nicola Cantan 15 Comments

Student will Stick to the Practice Plan with Practice Steps Stickers

Most of what determines student success is if, when and how they practice. Students are generally spending at least 80% of their time at the piano without a teacher to supervise them.

In my quest for effective practice time I’ve come up with many solutions. My mind is always whirring trying to help my students to make the best use of this time and use good piano practice strategies.

Practice step stickers

As my students progress they get these practice kits to make their practice more engaging. I use my Playful Practice and Pensive Practice cards to randomise their practice time. And I make sure their assignment sheet is the best possible fit for them and their goals with one of these options.

Piano practice step stickers

There was still a gap in my toolkit though. And that’s been filled lately with these Piano Practice Strategies Stickers.

The Barriers to Effective Practice

For some students, these inventive practice strategies are fun and engaging…for others they just seem to get in the way. When a student is over-scheduled, or easily over-whelmed they may need a more straight-forward approach.

chain-link-barrier

I started to see this with a few students lately. They weren’t using the extra practice tools at home, and they weren’t following another strategy either.

These students were going home and playing start-to-finish, start-to-finish, start-to-finish.

That’s just not practice.

Searching for a Simple Solution

I carefully walked these students through an effective practice session in the lesson. They could go home and get great results by just repeating the same process.

But they don’t do that.

So, after we have worked through the practice steps we had a conversation about what we did. Where did we start with this piece? How many times did we do that? What did we do next?

But they still don’t reliably follow through at home. It’s still harder to do the practice steps than I’d like.

practice steps in pencil

That’s when I started writing down the steps on top of their piece as we discussed them. Now the information was all there on the same page, removing all barriers to following the process.

This was a bit of a lightbulb. Students started coming back the next week, sitting down in the lesson and automatically following the piano practice strategies without me even nudging them. It was clear this had finally seeped into home practice.

Practice Steps Stickers

As this idea developed, I turned some of the most common practice steps into stickers. That way I can just pop them on the top of a piece, and they never get lost or forgotten.

practice-steps-stickers

These printable stickers are available three ways:

  • The full sheet in colour as you see it above.
  • The black and white version of the full sheet.
  • Separated sticker pages so you can arrange them for your favourite sticker sheet.

There are lots of different options on these sheet, so just print them out and your ready to go. You can also apply the same principle and write out your own steps if none of these ones quite fit a particular situation.

Get the Printable Piano Practice Strategies

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Follow Through

Don’t just stick these on a piece and never mention it again. You need to be really consistent for this strategy to become second nature to your student.

Make sure you:

  • Do the steps together in the lesson.
  • Review the steps verbally.
  • Have the student explain the steps to you and talk about how it will work at home.
  • Ask the student to perform the steps again at the next lesson.

If you continue to follow these steps, over time they will become automatic. Your students won’t need the stickers, they’ll be able to tell you what steps they should follow off the top of their heads.

Got a stubborn student who still won’t follow through on the plan? Something like this might help to force their hand a little.

More piano practice strategies

These stickers give simple and straight forward solutions for piano practice, especially for beginners. But what about as students move into the intermediate stages, what can we do then?

I have several posts on this blog that might help you out as your students move along in their piano studies.

  • Effective Piano Practice Part 1
  • Effective Piano Practice Part 2
  • Effective Piano Practice Part 3
  • Effective Piano Practice Part 4
  • Effective Piano Practice Part 5
  • Piano Practice Kits
  • Piano Practice Mashup
  • 5 Awesome Practice Strategies (workshop video)
  • Practice feedback loop

Piano Practice Motivation

What if you can’t get your students to practice in the first place, never mind practicing effectively?

I’ve got you covered here too. Try some of these motivational ideas to improve practice regularity:

  • Extrinsic Motivation with the Challenge Board
  • The Summer Quest Practice Incentive
  • 40 Piece Challenge Stamp Cards
  • Anyone, anywhere, anytime

What practice instructions do you give to your students?

Do you give them checklists? Verbal instructions? Notes?

What format have you found to be the best for follow through at home?

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Filed Under: Planning lessons, Practice Tagged With: effective piano practice, parent practice info, piano practice strategies, teaching practice techniques, time management

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Lois O'Brien says

    30th October 2016 at 9:21 pm

    Are these printables formatted for a particular sticker (Avery?)

    Reply
    • ncantan says

      31st October 2016 at 9:42 am

      Hi Lois! Because I’m in Ireland we have different formats and different Avery references. That’s why I’ve included the separated stickers pdf so you can set it up just the way you like it (Avery has tons of easy to use templates for Word and other software).

      Reply
  2. Amy Chaplin says

    31st October 2016 at 1:01 pm

    I’ve been thinking of doing something similar so now you saved me some time! Like you, I’ve tried various practice strategies like giving them one new “practice activity” each week to complete but it seems like everyone ends up back in the same cycle of playing the piece over and over. These will be a nice quick little reference and I’m glad to see you included a variety of tactics on one sheet!

    Reply
    • ncantan says

      31st October 2016 at 8:51 pm

      Great! Hope they work as well for you as they did for me. Let me know how it goes if you try them. 🙂

      Reply
  3. TL Dyck says

    1st November 2016 at 7:40 am

    Such an excellent idea, and it saves writing on every piece! Thank you 🙂

    Reply
  4. Cara says

    28th December 2016 at 3:20 am

    Great idea–can’t wait to try these stickers! Thank you!

    Reply
  5. Nancy says

    27th February 2017 at 3:27 am

    Love this idea! Is there something you do to get the parents involved?

    Reply
    • Nicola Cantan says

      3rd March 2017 at 10:36 am

      One way to do that is to tell your students to “teach” their parents at home. Having them explain the process to their parents right after the lesson not only gets the parents involved, but also reinforces the learning for the students.

      Reply
  6. Kelsey says

    14th June 2018 at 12:13 am

    You have the coolest ideas, Nicola! Can’t wait to try these out!

    Reply
    • Nicola Cantan says

      14th June 2018 at 7:54 am

      Thanks Kelsey! Have fun with them!

      Reply
  7. Jill says

    28th March 2019 at 5:18 pm

    I can’t get them to work for my label sheet sadly. Any suggestions on how to ‘save’ this and use an Avery template (as suggested above). Or do you have a Word doc option, so I can change my own margins? Thanks!

    Reply
    • Nicola Cantan says

      29th March 2019 at 6:39 am

      Sorry I don’t have a Word version since I don’t use Word. Can you drag the pdf into word and resize from there?

      Reply
  8. Marcia says

    5th August 2019 at 3:17 pm

    I have been teaching over 30 years and am always interested in new ideas. I will use your stickers. I write lesson plans for my students in a notebook, but they almost never read them.
    For my beginners I use a method of practice called P3- Practice the first time saying the note names out loud, Practice the 2nd time counting out loud, Practice the 3rd time singing the words. This method is just for beginners learning their first notes. You can also add “finger numbers”.

    Reply
  9. Karissa says

    15th January 2020 at 5:22 pm

    Thses are great, Nicola! Thank you for sharing! 🙂

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Friday Finds | Piano Pantry says:
    31st December 2016 at 12:58 am

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About Nicola

Nicola Cantan is a piano teacher, author, blogger and creator of imaginative and engaging teaching resources. She loves getting piano students learning through laughter, and helping teachers to teach through games and off-bench activities, so that their students giggle their way through music theory and make faster progress.

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