Sometimes, piano students forget to bring their music books. It just happens.
As a busy parent myself, I have arrived with my child at Highland Dance class with no dance shoes, and at skating lessons with no skates. Life is busy and parents are sometimes frazzled.
When my piano student forgets her music and arrives with nothing but a shrug and an apology, I’ve learned to take what could have been a wasted lesson and turn it into a hyper-focused, super-productive lesson where progress on a piano piece still occurs.
Read on to learn my 7 lesson-salvaging strategies.
My Piano Student Forgot Her Music… Now What?
*Note: This post assumes that you don’t have second copies of the required music on hand. While you can always start new pieces, focus on other lesson activities, or review past material, often times you want to continue progress on your students’ current pieces. These 7 activities are designed to be used when you want or need to continue progress on assigned (and missing) pieces.
My piano students rarely arrive empty-handed, but when they do I immediately call upon my “Plan B”. Instead of spending entire lessons subjecting them to nothing but scales and sight reading, we are still able to make progress on their assigned pieces. This means that practice can still happen effectively at home and that students will return to lessons the following week (with music in hand!), having made measurable progress.
The next time a piano student forgets her music, try the following:
- Improv The Invisible: Help your student recall one measure or a recurring motive in her piece. Have her practice this “musical bit” several times. Using the I, IV, and V chords in the key of her missing piece, create a simple, chorded accompaniment that is repetitive and catchy. Have your student hop in when she’s ready, repeating her “musical bit” on top of your accompaniment. As you and your student find your groove, encourage her to a) add in other remembered bits of her piece or b) improvise by changing the rhythm, adding extra notes, or changing the starting note (sequencing it).
- Create a Piece Picture: Creating a Piece Picture is a memorization technique I use with my young piano students, but it works really well as a “forgot my music” activity too! Using a blank piece of paper, draw empty rectangles to represent lines of music – one rectangle for each line of her piece (as best you can remember.) Have your student use a variety of symbols, colors, shapes, letters, and words to fill in what she can remember from her assigned piece. For example, she may remember the starting note (write that at the beginning of the first rectangle), the last note (write that at the end of the last rectangle), shifts in hand position, certain rhythms, dynamic changes, LH chords, or accidentals. Each of these can be represented in your student’s own way by drawing abstract symbols or shapes, shading or coloring, or simply writing labels in the approximate area where they occur within each “musical line” (rectangle). When you have extracted every detail from her memory, she ends up with a “piece picture” that can be compared with the actual music when she gets home.
- Key Exploration: Spend some time discussing and teaching the scale, triad, arpeggio, and primary chords associated with the key in which your student’s piece is written. Key Exploration is a great time to spend extra minutes perfecting your student’s fingering, evenness of tone, and accuracy. Use our free, printable “Dragon Claw” duet for some extra arpeggio fun!
- Composition Starter: Take one small musical idea that your student can remember from her piece and use it as a “composition starter”, where the “small musical idea” becomes a motive that can be repeated, sequenced, extended, played backward, shortened, and otherwise transformed. Using an ABA format for your student’s “new piece”, use the borrowed bit of music as a springboard for creativity. Help your student create a simple composition in either the treble staff only or with simple LH chording as an accompaniment.
- Become an Adjudicator. Search Youtube for recordings of your student’s piece. As you watch together, teach your student some language that she can use to describe the viewed performance. Model “adjudicator-like” comments that include references to tempo, rhythm, dynamics, expression, phrasing, and articulation. With your student, discuss what she enjoyed about the performance, and what she would like to emulate. Valuable discussions can happen when your student becomes the “judge” of another’s performance.
- Channel Your Inner Hanon. Discuss and decide on one educational concept that can be found in your student’s piece (for example, perhaps her piece contained many triplet rhythms, two-note slurs, or an Alberti bass pattern). Together with your student, create three different, challenging warm-ups (à la Hanon) that focus on this one selected concept. Write the exercises on the back of a recipe card and send them home with your student to be included in her practice.
- Rhythmic Dictation. If you happen to have your student’s piece from memory, you can jump into teaching your student rhythmic dictation skills that will carry over into greater rhythmic accuracy when she returns home to practice. Play two measures of her piece at a time, stopping to allow your student to clap back the rhythm. Then, assist her in writing the rhythms on a blank piece of paper. Send the end result home for her to compare with the original score.
Did Your Student Forget Her Music On Purpose?
Is it possible that your piano student forgets her music on purpose? Sometimes, students are reluctant to voice their displeasure with a method book or a piece of music. Forgetting a music book then becomes a student’s strategy for finding new piano music.
If your teen students are constantly forgetting their piano books, it may be time to check out WunderKeys Intermediate Pop Studies For Piano.
Click here or on the image below to learn more.
Catherine says
These are effective strategies to delve deeper into a piece and broaden musical awareness even if a student hasn’t forgotten their music!
Andrea says
Hi Catherine – thanks for your comment! Yes – it’s very true. You can use these any time – and they’re a great “Plan B” for when your normal lesson planning needs to change 🙂
May Lauren Brinkman says
I agree with Catherine! Why wait for students to forget their music? These are fantastic ideas!
Creating a Piece Picture (or map, as I call it) shouldn’t be limited to only young students. I recently did this with a transfer teenage student who has been languishing in early intermediate repertoire for the last 5 years. With her previous teacher, she would spend 3 months learning a 2 page piece (and only work on one piece at a time!). Two weeks ago, we mapped the B section of Clementi Op. 36, no 1 Andante in her lesson. On her own, she mapped the rest of the movement, plus another piece I had assigned. The following week, she could play both pieces with no mistakes. She felt so confident in her abilities that she begged for a 3rd piece to work on!
Andrea says
Hi May – Glad you’ve found success with the “Piece Pictures” – I love to use this strategy and students find it enjoyable so it’s “win-win”!
Sandra says
Is thr Dragon Claw Arpeggio from a Piano Club book? I know I have seen it before & printed it out — but I am trying to remember if it was part of a larger collection. I have so many PC books now it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. (I need a better way to organize my saved files!! )
Barbara says
Hi Sandra, If you click on the link it will take you to the blog post about it, with another link to download it. If you don’t see the link the post was on October 9, 2016 and is call “A Rockin’ Arpeggio Duet to Change Teens Attitude Toward Technical Work.” I know all this because I had to look it up too:)
Barbara says
Love these ideas and I agree with Catherine — great ideas to use even with piece right there in front of them!
I do always ask my students if they remember any of their piece but these strategies will help me take it a few steps farther.
A couple of additional ideas (sparked by yours, of course!!): You could add in some mood/dynamics work. Especially with idea #6. Once they’ve played through the exercise you can ask them to play it in the mood(s) of their piece. You could also ask them to explore the title of their piece by drawing a picture inspired by it; then do some improv inspired by the picture.
As always, thanks for inspiring us!
Andrea says
Great suggestions! Thanks for commenting Barbara 🙂
Beth Yantz says
Absolutely.Love.Studio.License.Digital.Music! So glad to have these other ideas, too, but nothing beats having a copy on the iPad to work in the lesson time. Any annotations made can be printed and sent home (again) if needed, to be compared with the original. Bonus!
Milla says
I make it a point to have copies of all their music. I also copy their assignments in case they forget their assignment journal (and also for myself to prepare for their next lesson). They can’t get out of anything with me! Takes a lot of printer ink, but it worth it.
Drema says
Great ideas for practising an invisible piece! I have to admit I haven’t thought about this before and I used to get a bit upset, disappointed if they forgot their books or just end up not being able to help them continue their progress on the forgotten piece.
Thanks for encouraging us to think outside the box! I feel that creativity comes when a problem arises to spark fresh new ways of doing something that becomes an opportunity to grow/flourish rather than just being stagnate & stuck in the problem. =)
Andrea says
Hi Drema – yes, it’s a good opportunity to turn what could be a negative into a positive 🙂 Thanks for reading our blog!
AMBER says
I usually have copies of most things my students are working on so if they forget it’s not a big deal! I keep my copies in plastic binders and can almost always lay my hands on any piece of music we need!
Clare Redfarn says
Spend the lesson working on sightreading.