Teaching Tip Tuesday: Teach those chords!

October 16, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Teaching Tip #10: Teach those chords!

I have recently discovered the importance of teaching chords. Lately I have been really trying to get all of my students, all ages, playing major and minor chords all over the piano and in different inversions. A huge help in this has been in using my technique booklets – My Muscle Builders Book and My Muscle Builders Book 2. My students have amazed me in their chord-playing and I really think it is helping them become overall better musicians.

Understanding and being able to easily play chords, in different inversions, helps students in learning their pieces. SO, so often their method book pieces have a melody line in the right hand and chords in the left hand (whether block chords, broken chords, or whatever figuration the notes are in). When students don’t understand chords well, each measure can be a struggle to learn. Many students need to stop and “figure out” the notes of each measure. BUT, if they are good at chord-reading and have a good understanding of primary chords used in a key, all you need to do is have them take a look at the piece and point out the basic harmonies. They will see that a piece may only consist of C, F and G7 chords, and will be able to learn it SO much faster because they are already pros at playing those chords.

Many of my students have also started playing a bit from fakebooks, and it is so fun to see them use their chord-playing knowledge to fill in the harmony (all on their own!!) of a fun, familiar song. I really have been enjoying this awesome Disney Fake Book (Fake Books), and it has a great variety of songs, some easier ones that my students have been enjoying, and some harder ones that I have been having a lot of fun with as well!

So teach those chords! Let’s create a generation of great, well-rounded musicians, shall we?

Teaching Tip Tuesday: Highlight It!

October 9, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Teaching Tip #9: Highlight It!

Happy Tuesday! I’d like to thank all my great readers who keep coming back even after such intermittent posting on my part 🙂 I’d like to get back to sharing some simple teaching tips each Tuesday that have helped me in my own studio – and hopefully they can give you some ideas to help in yours! Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference.

Today’s tip is about highlighters. I love to keep a highlighter marker near my piano to use during lessons. Then I have my students use it to sort of analyze a piece they are working on, and to isolate and highlight a specific thing they need to work on.

I have a student who just learned a piece in their book very well – that is, he learned all the notes perfectly but I didn’t hear much change in dynamic levels. So I had him take the highlighter and go through the piece and circle all of the dynamics.

Slurs are another great one – have your student highlight the slurs or phrases in a piece to help them remember to play them nice and legato.

Whatever a student is learning or struggling with at the moment is a great thing to circle or highlight. Having the student actually do the highlighting puts them right in the middle of the learning process; rather than watch you circle the things that they missed in their music, they have the opportunity to take a good look at their own music and figure it out on their own.

What are some simple ways you involve the student in the learning process? Do you have any particular ways you typically like to mark up the student’s music?

Amazing Autumn Lesson Plan!

September 23, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Happy Autumn! Who else loves this season?? It definitely is my favorite. Since I live in San Antonio and we sadly don’t get much of an autumn here (except for the constant sound of acorns hitting and rolling off our roof), I thought we could bring in the season with a little Vivaldi, pumpkins, and falling leaves (even if they aren’t real leaves…). I have been working hard getting our next Early Explorers preschool music class lesson plan all ready to go…just in time for the season!

This was one of the first Early Explorers lesson plans that Nichole and I wrote, and we had such a great time planning it and especially coming up with the song lyrics! It is such a fun lesson – I love that the children get to dance around to Vivaldi’s Autumn with giant fall leaves, I love the fun Carl Kolling piano piece we use to talk about raking leaves and jumping in the pile, and I just love this theme! Here is a little sneak peek of the objectives for this lesson plan:

This lesson plan does have some slight similarities to the “Spectacular Spring!” plan, because we wrote the Spring plan to take Autumn’s place when we taught our class in the Spring 🙂 I think the two lesson plans complement each other nicely (and we’ve thought all along how neat a Vivaldi’s Four Season’s lesson plan pack would be…). I hope you and your students enjoy bringing in the fall season with this lesson! It is 43 pages long and includes a student Take-Home Booklet, three songs, lots of clipart, templates and tutorials, and more. Book is in downloadable e-book format and will be available for instant download after payment. Purchase here or in The Teaching Studio Store.

$10.00

My Muscle Builders Book: Level 2 now available!

September 11, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Hello, hello! Happy Monday evening! I hope that many of you have been able to use and enjoy my first Muscle Builder Book. I know that my students have done an amazing job in learning all of their scales and chords, and have enjoyed learning them with the help of this fun little book.

For ages now I have been working on the level 2 book – deciding what I wanted to be in there, trying exercises with my young students who just whizzed through level 1, and so on. I am so excited tonight to announce that I have finished the “My Muscle Builder Book 2” and it is now available for purchase as a digital download in The Teaching Studio Store.

So, let me tell you a little about this book! My goal for this book, other than the obvious of teaching my students scales, chords, and such and improving their technique, is to build a super strong foundation of chord-playing, and to help them really be able to play in any key. I want them to have the tools necessary not only just to read music and sight read a piece, but I want them to be good, well-rounded musicians who can harmonize a melody with chords. I want them to have a great understanding of the way music works – not only to just understand it and get it, but be able to do something with it. I think this will be an excellent tool for developing those creative keyboard and harmonization skills down the road. So I am super excited!

Here’s a bit of a preview:

The book really stresses knowing how to spell the chords. Students will do lots of review of the chords learned in book 1 and will get pretty good at playing them.

Along with the major scales and chords, minor is also introduced in this book.

We do a lot of review of the same material, but do so in different and fun ways. These “Fancy Arpeggios” help encourage musicianship, good piano posture, fun with dynamics, pedal-playing, and leaning your body into the notes instead of scooting all over the bench.

We do more hands-together five-finger scales in this book, as well as scales in contrary motion. The book continually stresses the importance of curved fingers and playing on fingertips – gotta develop that good technique!

We also get into chord inversions! I am continually amazed at my young students (6, 7 years old) who catch on so quickly to these concepts. All chord inversions include colorful pictures with note names and correct fingerings for developing good habits from the get-go.

I hope you all enjoy this new technique booklet! It is available on this page, as well as in The Teaching Studio Store. It is 37 pages, and is in digital e-book format. You will receive an email with an instant download link following payment. You are encouraged to print off as many copies as you’d like for use in your own private studio.

My Muscle Builders Book 2

Price: $10.00

Click here for Muscle Builder Book 1, and here for Muscle Builder Book 3!

Some of My Favorite Pieces I Sightread

September 4, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Happy September!

Whew, well I had a whirlwind of a time my last few weeks of summer and a lot of things came up, BUT am happy to say that I finished my Summer Sightreading Challenge and sightread over 100 pieces! Yes, I may have begun the summer sightreading much harder and longer pieces than I ended with, but I did complete the challenge 🙂 I really enjoyed it, particularly because I got to discover some amazing pieces I had never taken the opportunity to play before. My sightreading skills increased (which I think is true for anyone at any level who decides to sightread consistently) and it gave me, a busy stay-at-home mom, a great excuse to play more consistently.

I wanted to share some of the great books I decided to sighread through this summer – kind of a random assortment, but that’s how I roll!

I started out with some Debussy – very challenging sightreading but I loved it. I discovered that I LOVE the whole Suite Bergamasque (which includes the famous Clair de Lune – I think it’s wonderful to hear such a beloved and often-heard piece in the context of the whole work!). Hear Richter play it here and here.

I read through most of the Debussy book (see below) and then decided I needed a change…so I went onto some Handel! There’s nothing like a little Baroque to give you some much-needed simplicity and straightforwardness after playing Debussy for a month. I love these composer series editions by the Frederic Harris Music Company (seen below, and also the whole collection can be found here – I love the clean, solid colors of the covers – it makes me want to buy them all and line them up on a shelf!! Someday…)

I also tried out some Scarlatti sonatas – I really haven’t played much Scarlatti and would LOVE to delve more into his sonatas someday. They were a nice read.

For some variety I decided to turn to some Scriabin Preludes – so gorgeous and haunting! These were excellent to read because despite their intricacies they were quite short. I discovered that, just like Chopin, Bach, Shostakovich and others, he wrote 24 Preludes, one in each key. Take a listen to his Prelude in C Major, Op. 11 No. 1, and tell me if it doesn’t remind you a bit of Chopin’s first prelude in C Major…

Grieg’s Lyric Pieces were SO FUN! I love the great variety of his pieces and the scenes and stories they depict. I definitely enjoyed some more than others. One of my favorite sets that I read through was his 6 Lyric Pieces, Op. 43 – I particularly liked No. 1 – Butterfly and No. 4 – Little Bird (and of course No. 6 is a classic!).

I ended with some of the Applause book – which, if you are not familiar with and have teenage students, I would highly recommend that you go out and get a copy now! These pieces are SO much fun to play – I think they are a great way to get your teenage students excited about classical music. Pieces included come from all of the musical periods and are all impressive and showy solos. I especially loved playing Beethoven’s Six Ecossaises!

Well I hope that a few of you were also able to hone your sightreading skills this summer, and I hope you also discovered some great pieces! How did your sightreading go? Did you find any pieces that you just LOVE and would like to share? Happy sightreading!

Lesson Plan Added: Traffic Jam! (and our giveaway winner!)

July 22, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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We have a winner! The lucky reader who will receive a free copy of my “Night & Day” lesson plan is…

Congratulations dianne c! Please send me an email with your email address so I can get you your download link!

And I am excited to announce that there is a new Mighty Musicians lesson plan available for purchase today in the Teaching Studio Store!

“Traffic Jam!” is a lesson plan all about rhythm and beat in music. We learn that music is made up of a pattern of short and long notes, and that there is an underlying steady beat. Students are introduced to half, quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes in a fun way, we create our own Rhythm Traffic Jam by clapping and speaking the different rhythms. We listen and sing to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, we write our own 1st Symphony. We listen and move to another fun song about traffic. We use our fingertips to play a pre-staff notation piece on the piano. Here are a couple of previews:

Like our other lesson plans, this one comes with a fun student take-home book and many other great resources and take-home extras. It is 51 pages and is in downloadable e-book format. You may purchase it on this post, or visit my new Teaching Studio Store page!

Traffic Jam! Lesson Plan: Music Has Beat & Rhythm
Price – $10.00

Have a great day!

Mighty Musicians! (…plus a giveaway!!)

July 15, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Happy Saturday!

Well as some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been around a lot lately. I’ve been a bit busy….my friend Nichole and I recently wrote a whole new curriculum and taught a new music class for 5- and 6-year-olds. We call it Mighty Musicians and it was a big success! We are so excited to share it with you all, and I’ve been working like crazy getting these lesson plans all ready to go.

Our Mighty Musicians class is similar to the Early Explorers course (and I *promise* to have more of those lesson plans available soon as well!), but geared toward those 5- and 6-year-olds who are able to catch on and then apply the musical concepts a little more quickly than the preschoolers. This class is very fun, and it involves lots of singing and movement and creative play with the music, but it also has some basic piano technique elements involved to give those kids a great and fun intro to piano lessons! At each class, students get to play simple pre-staff notation pieces at the piano, and they also get to compose their very own songs! We learn about some famous composers and their music and just have a blast singing and moving and listening.

We have five lesson plans that will soon be available for this class (for either a week-long camp or a five-week course). Each lesson is for a one-hour session. Our plan is to get a new one up and available each week….so stay tuned!

TODAY, the first lesson plan, Night & Day: Music Tells a Story, is available for purchase on my “Lesson Plans for Sale” page, and we will also be giving away ONE free copy to a lucky reader!!

The format of the lesson plan is a downloadable e-book, which is awesome because once you purchase it you can print out as many copies of the pages as you need for your class. It is 82 pages chock full of awesomeness…aside from the actual lesson plan and teacher’s guide, there are plenty of resources, printables, songs, clipart, and visual aids, and it also includes a ten-page student take-home book! We think you’re going to love it 🙂

So a little about this lesson plan – we talk about how music tells a story! We do this all within the fun theme of “Night & Day.” We go over some basic musical elements, learn a little about Edvard Grieg and a couple of his famous pieces, sing and move to his music, improvise at the piano, write our own compositions using the musical elements we learned about, learn some basic keyboard topography and play a simple piano piece!

Here are some sneak peeks into the lesson plan and its contents –

So would you like to win a FREE copy of this lesson plan? Just leave a comment! You may receive ONE extra entry into the giveaway by posting about this giveaway on your blog or facebook page (leave an extra comment to let me know you did it). Giveaway ends on Friday, July 20 at 11:59 pm Central time. I’ll announce the winner next Saturday.

Points for Prizes

July 6, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Jenny Jones here. For the beginning of summer lessons, I wanted a fresh way to motivate my students to practice. Most were already in the habit of practicing everyday, though not always effectively. I felt like they were feeling in a rut, and I was feeling like I had lots of extra time on my hands, being done with school, and all. So I developed Points for Prizes.

How it works:

I made notebooks for each student with pages that look like this

and inserts that look like this (with room at the bottom for special student-specific points-earning activities)

Each week I have them keep track of what they practice each day, with the charts on the right of the assignments, as well as the number of minutes at the bottom (PI, in the notes section, is for parent initials 🙂 just to keep things honest).

When they come to their lessons, I have a chart for each student where I keep track of the points they’ve earned that week.

When they get to a hundred points, they get a sticker. When they get to 300 points, they start earning prizes.

The way I figured out the points and prizes began with what my expectations are for their practice. I expect them to practice everything everyday. That’s why that is worth so many points. I also want them to spend lots of time at the piano. I think a lot of my most valuable time at the piano was “goofing off”, not playing what I had already played, but learning new things by sight reading, picking out things by ear, etc. This way I’m rewarding both good practice and lots of it. Once I knew what I wanted every student to do every week, I started assigning point values to those assignments. I decided that 70 points a week was sufficient and sustainable (we can’t have them burning out).

Then I had to decide how much the prizes would be worth. This was trickier, and I’m still trying to figure some of them out. At first, I decided it would be by cost to me. I was willing to spend x amount per student per week if everybody was achieving those 70 points. But the challenge is that the older students are, the more expensive they are to motivate. I’m talking about the 10 to 12 year olds. Anyone older than that isn’t really interested. Plus, there comes a point when they need to be internally motivated. I’m trying to build solid practice habits now.

Things I think are working:

*Motivating younger students–the 5 to 9 year olds are eating this up.

*The expectation–I was happy to find out that many of my students already were doing some of these things. By spelling everything out like this, they are starting to prioritize they way I’d like them to prioritize (“oh, you mean, if I practice everything every day, I get a bonus of 30 points?!” “you mean, it’s not enough to just play the piano for 30 minutes every day?”).

*My instructions–I’m learning to be very specific in how they should practice, which is what I should have been doing all along. With some students it isn’t enough to say, “Learn this for this week.” I have to help them find the hard spots, make a plan for how to practice those sections differently, and then do some practicing in the lesson where we learn just how many times it takes them to get something solid. Since I am rewarding them for good practice, they want to know just what it takes to get the reward, so they are very interested in creating the plans for good practice. It’s kind of win-win.

Things that I still need to figure out:

*Motivating older students–one parent had a great solution. She said there was a toy that her son really wanted that they were willing to buy for him, but that he would earn it via this points system. So I sent her the points information and told her what my expectations are and then asked her to decide how many weeks of good practice she thought this toy was worth. Hopefully it helps him! The problem is that at this age, the kids are starting to be doing things by internal motivation, and then this amounts to bribery instead of incentive. If they really don’t want to practice, they won’t.

*Group prizes–I want to have a pizza party at the end of the summer. At first, I was going to have it for everyone who got x or more points. But I didn’t want to exclude anyone, especially the very young kids who aren’t practicing that much anyway. So then I decided that I’d do a group effort. If, as a group, we get x points, then we can have a pizza party. But I’m not sure what a reasonable number is at this point. This could be effective for kicking in some urgency. I will have a poster that shows how close we are to the number of needed points. If, come the beginning of August, we’re not on target, then I know at least a few of them will start some crazy practicing in order to push the numbers up.

*Long-term effects–I don’t like a lawyerly kind of “payment” for practice. Also, I don’t know how to insert a bit of new excitement into the program every semester or so. Maybe new prizes showcased every few months. Or a twist that involves some group lessons and the attendant activities. Ideas?

Updates on Summer Sightreading!

June 26, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Hi folks! Thought I should check in on my Summer Sightreading Challenge! How are you all doing?? (Haven’t lived in Texas QUITE long enough to get the y’all down…)

So I was doing great for a couple of weeks. I sightread through almost all of my Debussy book. LOVED playing the entire Suite bergamasque and think I may have to learn that one one of these days. Some other faves were the Ballade and the Mazurka. Wasn’t a huge fan of Pagodes (that was kind of a beast). A week or so ago I got to L’Isle joyeuse (near the end of the book) and just didn’t have the heart to attempt it that night. I moved onto some simple and SHORT Handel pieces, which was SO fun and such a breath of fresh air after all the craziness of Debussy. I almost felt like it was cheating a little to count a Handel one-pager as one piece, just as I counted a 15-page Debussy as one, but I suppose it all evens out. 🙂

I am loving the sight reading! I think that no matter what level of sight reading you are at, you can always improve, and the only way to improve is just to do it. And do it often. And if you do this challenge or a similar one your sightreading will improve so much! I think it is also a great confidence-booster – knowing you have the abilities to play through so many pieces helps you realize that you really can learn any piece you put your mind to.

I hit a bit of a road block in my sight reading last week, being swamped with preparations for my piano camp I am teaching this week. We are still teaching the 3- and 4-year-old “Early Explorers” class that we have done in the past (and more lesson plans will be made available to purchase…just let me get past this next week or so!), but we are also teaching a brand new class for 5-and 6-year-olds called “Mighty Musicians.” Today went so well, I think the whole class is going to be a hit! Our theme today was “Night & Day” – we did a fun overview of all the musical elements used to tell a “story” with music, and did some super fun activities using Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Lots of fun.

Well tell me how your sightreading is going!

Summer Sightreading Challenge!

June 8, 2012 Jennifer Boster

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Tonight I want to let you all in on a little challenge I have given myself for the summer, and invite you to join me!

First, a little background. I recently have been reading a fabulous book called The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child. While this book is not piano-related, I couldn’t help but relate so many things in it to piano teaching. The book is written by a sixth grade reading teacher who decided that by requiring students to only read 3 or 4 books (chosen by the teacher and read as a class with tons and tons of supplementary materials) over the course of the school year, students were not only not enjoying it, but were not becoming better readers. The only way, the author says, to help students become good readers is to require them to READ BOOKS – and a lot of them. She requires her students to read 40 books (of their own choice) over the course of the school year. It really is an intriguing concept, and it instantly made me think of piano. Of course we want our students to perfect their pieces, spend lots of time practicing each line, each hand, each nuance – but what has a student gained if they have a handful of pieces polished to perfection, yet they do not spend much time actually “playing” the piano, or “reading” through pieces? Or worse, they are not able to sightread a piece, and therefore are not able to just sit down at the piano and PLAY a piece for pleasure.

Anyway, it’s food for thought! I do think that sightreading is a vital skill that one should have to truly be considered a fine pianist. A good sightreader is someone who has a solid understanding of music theory and has the skills needed to apply that theory to make music. Plus, a pianist should be able to sit down and play for enjoyment. (I’d love to hear your take on sightreading…its importance, its place in piano lessons, etc.)

Now on to my challenge – as a busy mama, wife, and piano teacher, I have unfortunately too often set aside my pianist self (for lack of time and motivation – mostly time!) and not put my piano fingers to good use! This summer, I have challenged myself to sightread 100 pieces of piano literature. I want to get myself playing again. And playing a lot. I want to dive back into the joy of actually making music! I have set aside the evenings after I tuck in my children to do this, and am keeping track of which pieces I read through and how many pages I have sightread each day. I randomly decided to begin with Debussy (I grabbed this wonderful collection from my shelf and started playing! Claude Debussy: Piano Music (1888-1905)), and in the past week have played through twelve of his piano works (I am counting individual movements of larger suites, sonatas, etc. as one piece).

So, who’s with me?? I would LOVE to see many of my readers join me in this challenge, and enjoy playing some great music this summer! You can choose any composer and any pieces that you want. Maybe you’re dying to play through ALL of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier? Maybe some Chopin preludes? Whatever it is that you’ve been wanting to try, now is the time to go for it! I am super excited about this challenge. Now, I have had a week’s head-start, so I will try to finish my 100 pieces by August 24. For the rest of you, let’s try to complete the challenge by August 31.

So, in conclusion –

THE CHALLENGE: Sightread 100 pieces of piano literature this summer!
DEADLINE: August 31, 2012
LET US KNOW: If you want to be in on the challenge, leave a comment on this post! Feel free to grab a Summer Sightreading Challenge button from my sidebar to stick on your blog to help remind you. Plus, it never hurts to let others know you’re working on a goal to help give you some extra motivation 🙂

I will occasionally check in and let you know how I’m doing on the challenge (how it’s going, what I’ve been playing, some great pieces I’ve discovered) and I’d love to hear updates on your progress as well! Thanks for joining me, and happy music-making!