One of the approaches that I encourage my students to use to help them become fluent in piano arpeggios is a hands together pattern that one of my teachers showed me years ago. I could never remember the name of them, so I finally tasked one of my creative students with determining a name and […]
Videos
Student Favorites to Wrap-up the Year
Since this was our last week of lessons (next week we have our Year-End Evaluations) I let each of the students choose what they wanted to do for the lesson. Several (not surprisingly!) chose games. They love to skim the 5 for Fun! Games and Activities for the Private Piano Lesson book for ideas! One […]
The Creative Juices are Flowing!
After seeing Alyssa’s creative composition a few weeks ago, Stephanie and Claire were inspired to create their own musical sketch for a fun duet they were working on. They polished up their performance of Jalapeno Hop by Melody Bober and Stephanie drew the artwork for the accompanying story about a couple of jalapeno museum robbers. […]
A Creative Composition Project
In case anyone here didn’t already know how in love I am with the Piano Safari method, I thought I would share a highlight from the lesson this week with my new beginning student Alyssa. We learned the piece, Outer Space from the Level 1 book over the last couple of weeks. Outer Space is […]
Group Piano Class Highlights
Here’s a 1-minute video (created on my iPhone using the Videolicious app) of our first Vanishing Voices group piano class of the year! We had a great time playing a round of Composer Trading, performing for each other, learning about Josquin Desprez, listening to a couple of his compositions, and attempting to decipher the Latin […]
These are a few of my favorite [teaching] things…
We are officially two weeks into piano lessons for this fall, and everyone is off to a great start with our Vanishing Voices practice incentive theme! It’s fun to watch the students study the gallery of composers on the studio wall and learn how to pronounce their names. I attended a training seminar this weekend […]
