Whew! What a whirlwind it is when the school year starts back up and lessons are in full swing! As usual, we launched our new year of lessons with a September Surprise:
We began the evening with the big announcement of this year’s practice incentive theme! This is one of my favorite things to plan over the summer, and I love seeing the anticipation and then excitement on my students’ faces when they find out what the theme and objectives are for the year.
Each year’s practice incentive theme is conceived via a mixture of input from students and parents at their Year-End Evaluations, prayer, brainstorming, and lots of tweaking. This year’s theme, Destination: GPS, is a travel-oriented theme that will have students traversing the globe to visit 20 different landmarks. They’ll be earning 10-degree coins each week at their lesson by completing GPS tasks (piano-related assignments designed to help them Gain Knowledge, Practice Skills, and Share Music).
Love this shot of these kiddos – a collection of students and some younger siblings – during the announcement. Good thing their parents were paying attention!
As a part of the evening’s activities I like to include some team-based activities to help build camaraderie among the students and parents in the studio. Pitting students against parents is a good way to accomplish this! Haha!
We had a variety of geography and music-themed activities. The parents handily won three of the four: make a list of as many countries in the world as you can think of in 1 minute; correctly identify a page of composers from their headshots; name a piece of music after listening to a 30-second excerpt. The students won the challenge of drawing the most accurate map of the world.
Of course one big purpose of the evening is to give all of the students the opportunity to surprise me with a piano piece of their choice. It’s fun to see what they come up with!
And we must conclude the evening with a time of eating yummy snacks and visiting with one another!
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