Early Musical Literacy: 10 Recommended Resources

I’ve been thinking a lot about early music literacy, and the many ways in which we can help our young students learn to read music and become musically literate sight readers. Today I wanted to just share some of my favorite resources for creating great music-readers and sight readers!

Giant Floor Keyboard & Staff banners & beanbags

These are my favorite tools ever for getting kids off the bench and learning so many concepts in a fun way. They help you incorporate movement into musical concepts and are a great big visual for your visual learners. Want to make your own? Use my keyboard graphic and staff graphic to print a 3′ x 8′ banner at the copy store or website of your choice.

Steps & Skips Strips – included in my French Piano Pack & Sight Reading Tricks Pack

Best little flashcards for getting young students reading notes on the staff! See a video demonstration here.

Landmark Notes resources – included in my French Piano Pack

Once students are reading steps and skips, it’s a great time to start introducing some landmark notes. I have a cute landmark notes chart and some fun worksheets (featuring some Paris landmarks!) included in my French Piano Pack.

A Note in Time by Paula Manwaring

This is a GREAT resource for quick naming of notes and note-playing fluency. This resource makes sense to me because it mirrors my kids’ reading homework that they bring home from school – how many words can you read in one minute? How many notes can you name in one minute? It’s a fun challenge for my students to time themselves and see how many notes they can name in one minute.

Piano Safari Sight Reading Cards

This is my go-to for daily sight reading practice. These cards are so easy to implement and they have helped my students improve their sight reading so much!

Note Quest App

I love this app! It is similar in concept to the Piano Safari sight reading cards and is an AWESOME way to improve your students’ sight reading and fluency quickly. Highly recommended!

Notespeed Card Game

This fun card game is like flashcards, but way, way better! A great way to add games and fun to your studio while also adding engagement and learning.

Muscle Builder Books Series

My Muscle Builder Books take young students through all of the keys on the keyboard, teaching scales, chords, arpeggios and more starting from the first lesson. I love getting them familiar with chords and playing ALL over the keyboard, which grows their confidence and sets them up for all sorts of great things, like playing fakebooks and composing!

Easy Fakebooks

Once my students have learned all of the white-key major chords in the Muscle Builder Books series I love to get them started playing from a fakebook. This series of Easy Fakebooks by Hal Leonard is excellent! I didn’t realize until recently how many volumes they have….I kind of want to buy them ALL!! I have the Easy Disney Fake Book and the Easy Children’s Fake Book – both excellent! These are great because they are all in the key of C, giving your students TONS of songs to play in chords they are comfortable in and building their confidence. I start out with them playing the left hand chords all in root position with me playing the melody. We soon learn about chord inversions for playing the chords in easier positions, and then they start playing the melody as well.

Any easy C-position piano pieces for transposing practice

As soon as students know the white-key major chords and five-finger scales, they are ready to start transposing! This is a really fun lightbulb to see go off in your students, when they realize they can play their simple C-position pieces in ANY key!

I hope this gives you some great ideas of ways to improve your students’ musical literacy and sight reading skills! What are your favorite tools and resources for teaching these skills?

New Collaboration: NoteQuest app & The Playful Piano!

Today I am excited to tell you about a new collaboration that The Playful Piano has with the NoteQuest app!

NoteQuest has just released a brand new huge update which includes the new NoteFit for Sightreading, which as a teacher I am SO excited about! I have been using NoteFit with my own children for the past couple of weeks and it is an incredibly helpful tool. It is like a set of digital sight reading flashcards that gradually progresses in difficulty and tracks the students’ progress by unlocking badges. For every day of sight reading practice students can unlock a badge – when they earn 5 badges within a 7-day period they get to unlock their choice of printable prizes! Included in the selection of prizes are several coloring pages and activity sheets created by yours truly!

Check out the Note Quest app here! I can tell already that it is a game-changer.

Updates on Summer Sightreading!

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!

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!

what are your favorite books about piano teaching?

I hope you all had a wonderful week! I just drove for six hours home from visiting my in-laws in eastern Oregon (gearing up for a loooong drive from Utah to Texas in August!). Why is it that my two-year-old stays awake for the entire drive, until about 20 minutes from home when he finally decides to fall asleep? Good times. Well, here are our poll results from this weeks polls about sight reading!

How important would you say sight reading is in a piano education?

How often do you teach/require sight reading in your studio?


Thanks to all who participated in our polls!

This week I’d like to talk about books about piano pedagogy (or just about piano and music in general!), and some helpful things I’ve learned from them. I hope you will also share some of your favorite piano/pedagogy books, or books that have been most helpful to you in your own teaching. I am always up for a new read that will give me some fresh ideas about teaching! In place of our weekly poll, this week I’d love it if you could leave a brief comment on this post, telling us one of your favorite books about piano teaching/piano!

Putting Sight Reading to the Test!

Once your students have achieved a certain level of playing and sight reading, why not help put their sight reading to the test? Encourage them to accompany!

I love accompanying and feel that it is a really important skill for a pianist to have. We will definitely talk more in-depth about accompanying one of these weeks. As a young pianist, opportunities to accompany began to present themselves to me. As I used my piano abilities to accompany others, that was when my sight reading really started to improve a lot.

Encourage your students to:

  • accompany vocalists and other instrumentalists
  • accompany choirs
  • accompany for vocal master classes
  • accompany religious congregations
  • play in ensembles at school
Sure, as an accompanist you often get the music ahead of time and have time to prepare. But as you accompany more and more, there will definitely be times when the music gets placed in front of you right before you need to play it. This is why encouraging your students to accompany will definitely help them to become better sight readers and better overall musicians.

Studio Idea: have a sight reading competition!

I hope everyone is having a great weekend, and for those in the U.S., I hope you do lots of fun fireworks or something to celebrate the 4th! I myself am having a grand time visiting my in-laws in Eastern Oregon – I sneakily (or not so sneakily) wrote this post a few days ago and post-dated it. I love technology 🙂

Here’s a little idea I have (but have not tried yet) – why not have a sight reading competition in your studio?

You could challenge each student to keep track of their sight reading – either by how much time they have spent or how many lines or pieces they have sight read each week. Keep track on a big, colorful chart in your studio and at the end of the month (or however long you decide the competition will run), the winner gets a prize. If you teach a lot of advanced students, you could challenge them to sight read pieces from the piano literature of the great composers (and maybe get in on the fun yourself!)

I think this would be a wonderful way to motivate your students to sight read, and to get them to make sight reading a habit.

Improving Your Own Sight Reading

As we are discussing sight reading this week, I have been doing some thinking about my own sight reading.
Now, I have been sight reading for many years now, and feel pretty confident in my sight reading abilities. Because of this, I haven’t been sitting down and formally sight reading regularly. Of course I play a lot and sight read things here and there, but maybe I should be doing more.
I had a great Keyboard Foundations class in college, taught by Scott Holden. Each week we had a sight reading quiz. Dr. Holden would give us a piece of music (usually pretty advanced in some way or another), and we would have to record our sight read of the piece and turn it in. It was a bit stressful because if we stopped, missed a beat or skipped a beat we would automatically fail the quiz. I loved it though, it was such a wonderful learning tool. Thinking back on it it is such a great reminder of the need to sight read regularly, to always be improving our skills and to regularly become familiar with new repertoire.

As teachers, it is so important that we are able to sight read well. I once read an article in a music journal (I will have to go in my files and find it so I can quote it exactly!) that basically said that a good pianist should have sight read through all of the major piano works of the great composers. Now that is a lot of sight reading, but just imagine how a project like that could improve your playing (and your teaching as well)!

One of my favorite assignments in my piano literature class in college was to sight read through the entire Well-Tempered Clavier (both books). Now of course this took a bit of time, but what a rewarding thing! As teachers we need to be familiar with the great literature for piano.
One of these days (probably after going through all of my belongings, packing up our entire house, finding a new place to live and driving all the way to Texas with my little family and getting settled – ya know, after I have a little more free time :)) I would love to make a goal to sight read through a new piece each day, with the end goal being to sight read through a lot of the major piano works – Bach Well-Tempered Clavier (again), Beethoven Sonatas, Mozart Sonatas, Chopin Preludes, Nocturnes, Ballades, etc.
But for now, I just wanted to share some of those thoughts. Do any of you sight read regularly? Do you have anything to share regarding this topic? Also, I just stumbled upon this neat blog, check it out!

Good Habits of Sight-Reading

As a follow-up to Jenny’s post, I would like to mention a few good habits that we can teach our students as they work on their sight-reading skills.

  • no stopping: Jenny already talked about the importance of this habit. Sometimes students have developed such a bad habit of stopping that they don’t even realize they are doing it! The metronome is a good tool to help students realize where they are stopping, and to help them keep the beat consistent. Counting out loud can also be helpful, and of course good rhythm is essential to good sight reading. And like Jenny said, it is better to choose a nice slow tempo than to stop. Eventually, of course, if you are sight-reading as you accompany, it will have to be up to tempo, but the skills must be developed first at slower tempos.
  • no looking at hands: It is important for a pianist to have a confident feel for the keyboard, and to know the feel of any interval without having to look down at their hands (this feel for the keyboard is developed through good technique study). Looking down takes unnecessary time, and can cause you to lose your place in the music. For students who really struggle with this, you can cover their hands with a book or a towel (drape it behind the fallboard on a grand piano, and down over their hands). Another thing that works great is to have the student hold a paper plate in their mouth. They may feel a little silly, but it works!
  • looking ahead: If a student is busy looking at the note they are playing, they obviously don’t know what note is coming next. It is important for them to learn to look ahead so they know what is coming. As they get better at identifying patterns, they will be looking not just one note ahead, but whole phrases and measures ahead.
  • smooth eye motion: This is related to looking ahead, but has more to do with establishing a habit of keeping your eyes moving, so that you don’t get stuck on one note. This will allow the beat of the music to flow without stopping as well. A good way to help students learn this smooth eye movement is to cover the notes with a piece of paper, just as (or before) they play them. As you move the paper smoothly across the page, their eyes will naturally move smoothly with it.
  • reading from bottom to top: Most students are more comfortable reading treble clef than bass clef. If you can create the habit of reading the bass clef notes first, the treble clef notes will usually fall into place just in time. But if the treble notes are read first, the bass notes often just get left out.

If you find your students are struggling with basic sight reading, it is important to make sure they have the basic elements of notes, intervals, and rhythm mastered. Even more advanced students occasionally need to come back to a review of these basics, if they have never been good readers. Once students have a solid grasp of the basics, more advanced music theory concepts will become important in their sight-reading (for instance, recognizing chords, cadences, and form).
In order to really develop good sight-reading skills, it is important for students to be sight-reading on their own every day. One challenge I have had is in finding music for my students to sight-read, since once they have played a piece, playing it again isn’t exactly sight-reading. Here are some solutions I have found, and I would love to hear others’ ideas on this:

  • easy method books: students may have younger siblings who are playing in easy books that they can use for sight-reading, or if you have a library of method books and easy literature books, you could check them out to your students for a few weeks at a time.
  • Essential Keyboard Repertoire: I have used volume 1 of this series with advanced students, since the pieces are an intermediate level, only a page or two long, and there are 100 pieces in the book. For $10.95, it’s not a bad investment for several months worth of sight-reading.
  • folk tunes: a book like this one by Jane Smisor Bastien can provide easy tunes with simple rhythms and intervals for early sight-readers. The problem may be finding enough books of these to keep students busy, but an advantage is that most folk tunes are in the public domain, so while you can’t necessarily photo-copy published versions, you could easily write them out yourself and start a collection of sight-reading tunes for your own library. Folk tunes can also be a good place to teach transposition, another skill that will contribute to sight-reading ability.
  • hymns: If your students belong to a church, have them bring a copy of their hymnal to lessons. Hymns are usually too difficult for beginners to sight-read, but are perfect for intermediate and advanced players.
  • broadway or popular songs: These are really for advanced students only, as the rhythms in this type of music are much too complex for beginning readers. But for students who need a sight-reading challenge, these are a lot of fun.
  • Four Star: this is a gem that I have just recently discovered. There are 11 books, and each book has 10 weeks worth of daily sight-reading exercises. Read more about these books in this review by Sue Haug.

four steps of sight reading

Here are the four sight reading steps I teach my students:

  1. Look over the entire piece. Notice everything about it – key signature, meter, tempo, accidentals, slurs, staccatos, other articulation, hand position, range, fingering, how much your hand will need to move, any key changes, any tricky rhythms, dynamics, etc.
  2. Play the piece with no stopping or missing, skipping, or adding a beat. (You can go slowly, just keep going!) This is important for a couple of reasons – first, it teaches your students the good habit of not stopping when they mess up. Oftentimes students get so in the habit of stopping when they mess up that they automatically stop when they get to those tricky spots, even if they don’t do anything wrong. Secondly, when you are accompanying somebody you can’t stop. In my experience, the vast majority of my sight reading opportunities have been in accompanying vocalists, choirs or religious congregations. These are the times when the pressure is on – and you cannot stop, or else you will mess up the entire group. It is a great thing to learn to not stop right from the get-go!
  3. Evaluate how you did! Identify any spots you had trouble in, mistakes you made, etc.
  4. Play once more, this time going for accuracy. Aim to get everything right this time, to fix those spots you had trouble with on your first try.
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