A Post About Piano Lessons

I'm very excited to see my piano and voice students tomorrow and Thursday.  I have had a very refreshing break over the holidays, and I'm just itching to start teaching again!  I have spent some of my spare moments over the last few days transferring files from my digital recorder over to my computers and organizing them in folders for all of my student's audio portfolios.  As the year progresses I record important pieces that each student is working on.  Sometimes they pick out the music to be recorded, and sometimes I suggest that a specific piece goes into the portfolio because they have conquered a challenging concept in working on the piece, or because it is just well polished music that sparkles when they play it.

I have a huge stack of supplementary music all ready to go on my piano, labeled with sticky notes so I can find the right music for the right students and introduce it at lessons.  The piano bills from last month are actually already totaled and printed out so I can distribute them tomorrow.  The humidifier inside my piano is working overtime to keep the piano in tune.  

I'm excited to play button games.  Several years ago I made the fantastic investment of buying 30 colored buttons for two dollars at a craft store to use for piano lessons.  My younger students LOVE the buttons.  They place them on groups of two and three black keys, and practice putting them on white keys as I say the letter names.  When we get ready to read notes on the staff, we use them with flash cards so they can read the note and find the key that matches with the button.  We use buttons to show the differences between steps and skips and to measure intervals at the piano.  Bigger students build chords with buttons, show scale patterns.  

And I'm excited to use the really neat rhythm blocks that my husband helped me make before Christmas.  We cut pieces of wood in ratios, painted them coordinating colors and drew note values on the blocks.  They have been working so well to help my youngest students understand the relationship between note values by using manipulatives, and have helped my bigger students come up with complex patterns that they might use in their compositions (which I need to encourage them to write more often).  

Best of all, I have several new students that will be starting this week and last week.  Over the last three weeks nearly all of my lesson times have been snapped up.  New students are always fun.

I just love music pedagogy.  It is so much fun to work with my students and begin to understand how each of their brains works differently to process everything involved in learning the new language of music.  It makes me a happy, happy person.