The clock is ticking and your elementary piano student just isn’t “getting” her piece. You offer suggestions, write clues on the page, use reminder stickers, but nothing works. Your student is struggling.
“But…” nags your inner piano teacher voice, “she NEEDS a piano piece to practice at home!”
And so with each wrong note, stumble, hesitation and rhythmic error your blood pressure increases as the clock ticks on until the end of her lesson.
When the lesson is over you offer a few more hurried suggestions, maybe even write in a few more hints and place the book into the music bag knowing that home practice will be filled with frustration.
What else can you do? Your elementary student must have a piece to practice at home!
You’ve just been caught in the “Piano Piece A Week” Trap.
In today’s post we’re going to help you escape the trap, or better yet, avoid it altogether.
How To Escape The Piano Piece A Week Trap
We’ve all been caught in the piano teacher’s trap: the belief that early elementary and elementary piano students must be assigned a new piece each and every week. Too often, however, time constraints mean that teachers assign piano pieces without providing students with the necessary tools to tackle the piece at home.
This inevitably results in students who are frustrated with home practice; note reading suffers, rhythm falters, and fluency disappears. Eventually, you have a piano student who is unmotivated and piano parents who are making noises about practice wars at home.
The Solution: Focus On Concepts Not Piano Pieces
A shift in thinking is required to solve this problem. Rather than feeling the need to assign new piano pieces every week, teachers should focus on weekly pedagogical concepts.
Students should not feel the pressure to perfect a piano piece at home when they do not yet have all of the necessary skills to play the piano piece. Instead, they should focus on mastering the needed skills first.
Of course, if a student is to reinforce a concept, and not a piece, at home, they need activities to fill their practice sessions. And this is where “breaking free from piece to piece teaching” takes center stage.
When you decide to make the switch and teach to the concept and not to the piece, it is important that you have the necessary lesson activities to reinforce the concept in a scaffolded way. Such activities include short technical exercises, sight-reading practice, game-based learning, and rhythm work. Then, when it is time to send your students home to practice, they can practice any of the aforementioned activities if they just aren’t ready to independently practice a piano piece.
The result of this shift in thinking is a piano student who has fully internalized a new concept, can identify it both visually and aurally, and has practiced it in short, manageable sections.
This is a piano student who is ready to tackle a full piece NEXT week.
We all know this makes perfect sense. In a school setting, students don’t simply read books – closing one and immediately opening the next – in order to learn to read. Instead, teachers employ a wide variety of strategies away from the context of a book to give their students the skills to read and write. Teachers don’t assign a new novel every day to their budding readers. Instead, they assign manageable, focused activities and reading material that supports them.
Learning to play the piano should be no different.
Music Activities And Exercises To Escape The Trap
To get comfortable with this new approach to home piano practice you’ll need concept-based technical exercises, activities, and games that can be practiced at home as your student gets ready for a full piano piece.
When Trevor and I created our WunderKeys Elementary Piano Level 1 series we set out to create a refreshingly new approach to method books with this need at the forefront.
Will WunderKeys kids still be playing piano repertoire as they do in traditional method books? Of course! And a lot of it! But the interactions students have using our musical activities, exercises, and games before they reinforce skills with repertoire, is where the magic happens.
In Level 1, we’ve created unique ways for kids to engage with notated music based on research that shows that learning improves when skills are accessed and explored in different ways. With our books, if your students aren’t ready to practice full piano pieces at home, they have the technical exercises, sight-reading activities, ear-training games, and rhythm work that reinforces specific concepts so they will be ready to master piano pieces in the week to come.
The pressure you feel to assign new pieces every week will disappear, your student will leave your studio confident in her ability to practice the piano at home, and the progress that you, your student, and her parents expect will be both steady and stress-free.
Are you ready to free yourself from the “Piano Piece A Week” Trap? Check out our WunderKeys Level 1A and Level 1B books on Amazon. These books are for students who have completed a Primer-Level method book (of any series).
Love your WunderKeys Level 1 books and so do my students! My students have significantly improved in their note reading confidence! Thanks for thinking outside the box and outside the “piece a week” philosophy. WunderKeys is transforming the way my whole studio runs, from the beginner to advanced students too!!
So great to hear it, Amy! So happy to hear about the improved note reading and thrilled you’ve found success “outside the box” 🙂 We love watching your studio absolutely thrive!
What you say makes sense … but what about the piano student (not to mention the piano student’s parent!) who doesn’t want to do anything but play a new piece every week, even if he/she is exactly the kind of student you described above? I had one like that; all he wanted to do was play the piano, but it didn’t seem to clue in to him that he needed to remember more notes than Middle C in order to play. He loved his Wunderkeys primer book, but never seemed to remember anything out of it.
Hi Sarah! This “not remembering” can really be helped with this approach – if kids interact with their music in a multitude of different ways you are accessing different parts of their brain and creating memories that will then “last” when they get home to practice. We aren’t suggesting that you don’t send home music to practice – just that the music you do send home to practice isn’t always simply full pieces that students end up struggling through. Instead, send home focused activities designed to build skills needed for full pieces. This satisfies everyone’s need for material to play at home, yet builds needed skills in advance.