Category Archives: Learning

How to Practice for the beginner pianist

This week I have been creating practice charts for many of my beginner students. They are tailored to the age and ability of each students, and how (if?) they are progressing. This example is roughly what I wrote into their … Continue reading

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Bricks – Following a Melody

I’m spending more and more time in lessons with beginners working on identifying ‘steps’ (seconds) and ‘skips’. Reading music becomes much quicker when you don’t go to the trouble of working out the letter name of each note, but merely … Continue reading

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Questions, questions

I was trying to motivate a young pupil to SUCCEED in getting through a line of her piece without being frustrated and over-faced by the size of the task. We were sweating our way through the last line of ‘Train … Continue reading

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Building Chords with Bricks

I’ve been trying to think of an interesting and portable resource to help with uteaching chords and inversions. I never got the hang of these, never ever, until I started learning to harmonise Bach Chorales as part of my teaching … Continue reading

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On-line Learning

When I included a jazz standard in the list of pieces to learn for my Active Repertoire challenge (see this post, and Andrew Eales’ blogpost) I was reminded of the online jazz course I started at the end of last … Continue reading

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41/60 The “Father Christmas” scale

When I’ve young piano pupils learning their scales at this time of year, I sell them D major as “The Christmas Scale”. Yes, I know, offering a scale as a Christmas Treat might not seem to be totally in the … Continue reading

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40/60 Is this a Music Lesson?

One of my various employers has a policy of observing all their teachers at work every year. Not a bad idea… except if they were to observe me teaching one of my young piano pupils (eleven years old) I might … Continue reading

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30/60 Happy Birthday to me

It isn’t my birthday just yet, but I am teaching ALL my piano and keyboard students to play “Happy Birthday” at the moment. Preferably from memory, as part of my “Active Repertoire” project. Easy-Peasy, for beginners who know the letter … Continue reading

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