With just a little over a week until our rehearsal for the Christmas recital, it’s going to be a close call for some of my students! It’s right about now that I start second-guessing myself and wondering if it was really such a good idea to give them a challenging piece to learn (even though […]
Teaching
Connect the Dots – Sans Numbers
After a number of requests for me to send the numberless version of the connect-the-dots pictures I referenced in last Friday’s post, A Memorable Way to Convince Students That Fingering is Important, I decided to just upload my simple Word doc and make it available for easy download and printing. Just click here or on […]
Monday Mailbag – 5 Tips for Teaching Theory to Transfer Students
I have a 13 year-old student girl who came to me this fall after having had piano lessons for a number of years, but she has little to no theory background. She plays better than average, but doesn’t know simple things like what a sharp does to a note. The songs she played when she […]
A Memorable Way to Convince Students that Fingering is Important…
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while I have a student who requires more than a convincing argument to believe that something I’m making them do is important. For example, fingering. I find this aspect of playing to be particularly challenging for students who learn to read the notes quickly. They seem […]
My Favorite New Christmas Piano Book!
Several weeks ago, I posted about my afternoon of playing through Christmas music trying to find just the right piece for each student for the Christmas recital. As I confessed, I wasn’t that thrilled about spending a sunny Saturday afternoon in the basement at the piano, but when I started to play through these contemporary […]
Monday Mailbag – Not Giving Credit for Missed Lessons
Do you credit students for missed lessons if they let you know in advance that they’ll be gone? Also, do you charge for holding a space open for a student such as the one you mentioned that was moving or say if they had a long term injury such as a broken wrist? I had […]
