Rote teaching of piano pieces has been part of my methodology for quite a few years now (here’s a blog post where I respond to one reader’s question about the point of teaching by rote), so I’m always excited to find new repertoire or even books devoted to including this approach in a rounded music education for our students. This is one of the reasons I am such a huge fan of the Piano Safari piano method! Well, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it’s been about a year now since Paula Dreyer kindly sent me a copy of her book Little Gems for Piano: Recital and Rote Pieces for the Primary Stage, but better late than never, right?
In preparation for lessons resuming this fall, I’ve spent hours at the piano pouring through myriad books and pieces of sheet music and adding them to the files of various students according to what I think would be beneficial and appealing for them to work on repertoire-wise. Paula has some fabulous rote selections in this book that I think any beginning student would love to play! My favorites are Reflections and her two Spanish Dances. Some pieces include teacher duets, and all of the pieces include a box of musical elements for the student to notice and another with creative suggestions for playing the piece. Purchase of the book includes access to videos with demonstrations of all the pieces. I am greatly anticipating introducing several of these to one of my new beginning students this fall!
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