My 16 month old knows how to unlock my iphone. Her little finger swipes across that screen with an uncanny ease. My 16 month old also regularly calls Auntie Mimi, texts cryptic messages to Grandma and occasionally changes my voice commands. Kids love technology.
When searching for piano practice incentives I’m always looking for something new and interesting to catch my piano students’ attention. Kids today are seemingly beyond the same old same, old no matter how old they are. They need something new and fresh.
In last week’s post about beating the Blue Monday blues we mentioned an upcoming printable… and today we’re delivering it!
There’s an App For That…
It’s the start of a new month and it’s a great time to begin a new practice incentive in your piano studio. We designed this one to be über simple for teachers and completely cool for kids.
The incentive program works like this:
Download the Piano Phone template here and print one copy per student. Laminate and then cut out the phone as well as each of the apps.
1) Each student gets his or her own “phone”. My students are going to keep theirs inside a plastic page protector in their binders.
2) During the coming month, each time students complete one of the requirements listed on the parent information sheet found here they receive an app icon that they can then stick onto their phone’s home screen. (You can choose to hand this info sheet out to all parents, post the info on your studio website or Facebook wall or just post it in a visible spot in your waiting area. It’s a ‘newsy’ item that is a great word-of mouth generator!)
3) Students continue to meet these goals until their phone is filled with all of the available app icons.
4) Display the completed phones in your waiting area or take pictures of each of your students with their completed phones and instagram their photos (ooh… look how techie you are!)
Your students will be completely stoked about this fun new piano practice incentive. Engage kids by playing upon their interests and you will be amazed at the results!
What a great incentive !! I love it and my kids will too …!!
I really like this idea! I cut out the small pictures of the icon and I have make round stickers using Post-It round labels. Anxious to see how much the students will finish up their phone!
Jeannie – wow… you’re on the ball! My clock said 5:48am and you’ve already been up and printing it 🙂 I’m impressed!! Great idea using labels. I’m sure the kids will just love it.
YOU ROCK!!! Thank you very much for ALL that you do. Can’t wait to share this with parents and students!
Thanks Jacqueline! Hope you have fun with it 🙂
What a fantastic idea!!! We just started a new practice incentive but I’m hanging on to this idea for the fall.
By the way, the Wunderkeys books I just ordered on Monday arrived yesterday (Thursday)! Talk about fast shipping…I wasn’t expecting them for two weeks.
Thanks for all you do!
Hi Melissa – glad to hear it! Hoping your WunderKeys launch is wildly successful!
Brilliant! I share your ideas all the time on the DVMTA Facebook page. I also write a newsletter article every month for our teachers group and last month I told them to read your blog. I am going to take your blog idea for today to our board meeting today and share it with the teachers.
Claire Westlake
President, DVMTA
Hi Claire – thanks so much for your support! It means a lot 🙂
Such a fun idea! And so nice to have in Feb when all the recital hype has died off, and the winter blah’s are still lingering. I will be printing these off for my students this weekend!
Any chance of creating a “Music Phone” and a more general instrument learning newsletter? We have a mix of piano, vocal, guitar, violin, etc. students at our school, and I am sure all of them would love to participate in this incentive program. The apps look like they could apply to all instruments (if not, no worries! You guys must be busy, and I can put a “Violin” label over the word “Piano” – as that is the extent of my crafting skills!)
Thanks!
I’ve printed the iPhone and parent’s sheet and am now waiting for the blizzard to stop so I can actually teach piano lessons without cancelling because of snow! What a great way to come back though. Thank you. I’ll let you know how it works.
This is a fabulous idea, and something I am interested in trying. I may only do it with the younger students who need the incentive. The high school kids will not need this. Thanks for this great idea!
I started the Challenge this last week with nine of my students. The first question was what’s the prize? I said it was a Challenge to see how many APPs you can get. That didn’t go over too well. One student suggested that the winner(s) get their picture in the local paper. Great idea! So after one week, no APPS appeared on the phones on the studio wall but several APPS were started like the sightreading and ET. I’ll be very happy if someone gets the theory APP as it is a struggle to get them to do it each week. I usually end up doing it in the lessons because once again they’ve not done it at home. Not this week, if they didn’t do it, they have to do it at home to get the APP. I suppose if I’d had a huge candy bar as the prize, I’d have more interest but I just didn’t want to go that route this time. The newpaper photo will work….I think. I’ll let you know next week.
Cindy, what did your students think about the photo idea? That’s my only concern with this great idea – my students will expect a prize, and at my studio that means a party. That wouldn’t be too bad, actually. My parties always involve theory games, and they never seem to care!
Just completed our app incentive! All my students managed to pull it off. The hardest part was getting my older students to memorize pieces. I ran the program for 6 weeks, rather than one month. At the end we gathered for a pizza party and watched “Beethoven Lives Upstairs.”