Top Tips for Keeping a Preschool Piano Lesson Under Control

Preschoolers are super fun, energetic and enthusiastic. But teaching preschool piano lessons definitely has it’s challenges. How can you keep these bundles of excitement under control?

I’ve been teaching preschool piano for a little over four years. I’ve learnt a ton in that time, and my littlest students continue to teach me more each week.

The biggest lesson that I’ve had to learn is about keeping the preschool piano lessons under control. I’ve never had a lesson that got completely out of hand, but you definitely need to run a tighter ship with these kiddos. 😉

More recently, I’ve been taking on partner students at this age. Even more reason to stay on top of my game – I’m officially “outnumbered” in partner lessons.

In my interview with the Upbeat Piano Teachers, we talked about this partner lesson set up and so much more to do with preschool piano. Have you seen the course yet? Click here to learn more about it.

Have a Plan

Is that advice too obvious? I’ll clarify. Have a detailed and specific plan.

With older students your plan might go something like: “oh, that blues exercise looks cool, I’ll make a note to try that with Susie on Tuesday”.

That’s not good enough for preschool piano lessons. You need a ton of activities planned, and you need to have a rough sketch of the order. Something like this…

Think that’s just crazy town? Fifteen activities in one lesson? You might not get through all of that. But I recommend planning at least eight things for a 30 minute lesson, and probably about fifteen or so for a 45 minute lesson.

That’s about three minutes on each activity.

If you’re not used to working with tiny brains, you’re going to think this is bananas. Trust me, it’s not. Some tasks will capture their attention for 5-10 minutes, but many will be done with after 1-2 minutes, so you need to plan a lot of stuff to do.

By the way, see all those green and blue parts of my plan? Those are all things that are not on the piano. Only the orange stuff (less than half) is actually spent on the bench.

Wondering what those SILLINESS SIESTAS in my plan are? Keep reading!

Know Your Plan

OK. Do you have your preschool piano lesson plan? Great. Just don’t count on actually looking at it during the lesson.

You need to memorise it. Or at least, pretty much memorise anyways.

Remember how you’re switching activities every few minutes? That means you need to be quick. You’re going to have time to read one word to twig your memory, but you will NOT have time to read a sentence. So you better know those activities inside out, upside down and backwards.

If this all sounds like just way too much work to do each week, I hear you. And I have good news: preschoolers LOVE repetition.

You need to switch activities often in the immediate, but you also need to repeat those same activities again and again over time. So once you’ve made one plan, half of the next one is already made. And a third of the following one, and so on.

Here’s how the plan I showed you earlier might progress over several weeks.

You’ll see that the format is largely the same, and much of the plan is repeated so that we can reinforce the same concepts over time. So once you get onto the planning road, it becomes smoother and smoother each week. Until you’re a preschool piano planning pro!

Be Interesting and Fun

So, you’ve got a plan, you know the plan, now you need those little preschoolers to follow it. This is the easy part – if you’re interesting and fun, they’ll follow your lead.

If you’re boring, they’re going to go find their own fun. Preschoolers were made for play and exploration. They will seek fun out if you don’t provide it.

This is where those SILLINESS SIESTAS come in. Remember those? These are little cards that I use in my preschool piano lessons to provide quick, musical brain breaks.

You can download a sample of the cards by entering your details here.

Vibrant Music Teaching members, you can access this resource inside the VMT library. Not a member yet? Find out more about becoming a member here.

 

What are your struggles with preschool piano teaching?

Is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask about teaching this age group? A challenge you’ve had in the past? Leave a comment below or join the  Vibrant Music Studio Teachers community on Facebook and ask there.