Implementing Music History into Your Piano Lessons – the Easy Way!

“Building desirable attitudes toward music is the first aim of all music education.” – Mabelle Glenn, music educator

There are SO many reasons why we should teach our piano students to love and appreciate great music. They need to be LISTENING to piano music from all different eras, countries, styles and composers to help develop their ear, become well-rounded musicians, get inspired to practice, and so many more reasons. And learning the HISTORY behind the music is SO important to give them CONTEXT to what they are listening to. That is why it is so important to include music history/appreciation in our teaching!

There are so many great ways we can do this, and that is another post for another day – but I think that the important thing is to just get them LISTENING.

Have you tried out my Shades of Sound curriculum yet? This well-researched and engaging music history curriculum is so easy to implement. I have literally done ALL the work for you. You can use it with individual students by assigning them a page per week (which gets them listening at home and hopefully the whole family will get to listen to some great music – bonus!), you can use it during lessons if you have some sort of listening lab or partner lessons with time for listening or other work, or you can do it all together as a group during a group lesson or class.

The basic premise of the curriculum is that the students read a little bit about the composer, learn some background information about the piece, and then as they listen to the piece (using the accompanying playlist, accessed by QR code) they get to color a beautiful coloring page. This curriculum utilizes all four learning modes – reading/writing, visual, aural and kinesthetic. Try it out today! Shades of Sound: Summer is a great place to start during the summer break. Explore music by composers such as Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Gershwin, Copland, Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, Elizabeth Maconchy, Judith Lang Zaimont and more!

Available for digital download in the shop, or paperback edition on Amazon.

Happy teaching!