For a minute, imagine you have only one remaining spot in your piano studio schedule and you’re trying to decide if you should find a 5-year-old or a 12-year-old student to fill it.
What would you do? Fill that final spot with a cooperative pre-teen or a little ball of energy?
I would suggest to most teachers that they should focus their efforts on filling that final piano lesson spot with a 5-year-old.
If you want to know why I am suggesting you look for the student with the short attention span, I’ll explain below.
Why You Should Fill Your Studio With Preschoolers
Before we get started, let me say that I am not suggesting you take a 5-year-old student over a 12-year-old student. If you have two students looking for piano lessons and both are a great fit for your studio, the best business decision is to follow the first come, first served principle.
But if you are choosing how to focus your marketing efforts to attract a family with a 5-year-old piano student or a 12-year-old piano student, then reaching out to the younger age demographic is the way to go.
Don’t get me wrong, every piano teacher should have a schedule that includes 12-year-olds. In fact, every teacher should have a schedule that includes a wonderful variety of age ranges.
But if you only have one spot left, and you plan on teaching for many years to come, that spot is best filled by a 5-year-old.
And the reason for my decision: the parents of 5-year-old piano students will help you grow your studio. Here’s why:
Preschool Piano Parents Are Walking and Talking Billboards
Parents of preschool piano students are more connected to their communities than parents of older students. As a parent with kids who are getting older (sniff, sniff!) I know this all too well.
When my children were preschoolers, I saw other moms all the time. We chatted after dropping our kids off at preschool, we had playdates with our children, and we organized after-school field trips. I would see my “mom group” all of the time.
But as our kids got older, we started to lose touch. Many moms went back to work, our children took the bus to school, and play dates no longer required a parent to tag along.
Needless to say, I no longer have influence over or am influenced by other parents. I just don’t see them enough anymore.
Since parents who chat about your studio with other parents are the greatest form of advertising, as illustrated above, I am no longer the ideal piano parent.
A preschool piano parent, however, is a gift to any teacher with empty spots in a lesson schedule. If you can win over a preschool piano student, that student’s parent will sing your praises to anyone and everyone they meet, and before you know it, you’ll have a waitlist a mile long!
But First, You Must Win Over Their Preschool Piano Student…
If you have never taught piano lessons to preschoolers you may be apprehensive about this new age group. We often talk with teachers who are nervous that preschoolers will be too busy or will not be able to pay attention during lessons.
All of this might be true if you were using a traditional method book.
But, as thousands of piano teachers have discovered, our method book series, WunderKeys Piano For Preschoolers, will make your youngest kiddos the highlight of your teaching day. The three books in our preschool series follow a “lesson-in-a-box” approach where every unit contains movement activities, off-the-bench games, developmentally appropriate music, and story-based learning.
And it gets better! WunderKeys is so much more than a method book series. We have an online toolkit called Growing With Wunderkeys where every week we provide free marketing and advertising advice, teacher success stories, first lesson fun packs, members-only printables and more.
You can check out the WunderKeys Method Books here on Amazon and then join the Growing With WunderKeys Community here.
Also, the five years old will more likely take lessons for many years.
Yes – it’s true! Young students have less demands on their extracurricular time and are more likely to be a long-term student 🙂