We had a fabulous time at our September Surprise! kickoff last weekend and an invigorating first week back to piano lessons. One of the things I love about instituting a new practice incentive theme every year is the renewed excitement it gives all of us for another year of piano lessons. Each year’s theme is based on feedback from the students and parents about areas they want to see progress, evaluation from me about the areas I think my students need to grow, and specific theme suggestions from the students. I’m so excited about how this year’s theme came together and was thrilled to announce it to my students and their parents on Saturday:
Cracking the Crystal Code has a strong emphasis on developing sightreading fluency at the piano. The students are traveling through three caves that are designed to help them build the skills needed for this proficiency: Fearless Flashcards (solidifying the fundamentals), Persistent Playing (playing through lots and lots of music), and Enthusiastic Exploration (applying their knowledge in a wide variety of contexts, like transposing, memorizing, cup-tapping, theory worksheets, and more). Along the way they are collecting crystals and adding them to their collection. But in order to retrieve each set of crystals they have to acquire the necessary code to crack open their treasure box…
We are off to an exciting start and I can’t wait to see how everyone grows this year – in both piano skills and character!
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