Practicing & Playlists
Warm-up Song
Using Chester Chills Out as an ongoing warm up exercise is appealing to me. One advantage is keeping the song alive over a long period of time. It can be played fast/slow, white/black notes. After level one, the next step is to take the advancing…
Top 40 Playlist
I have several students in Levels 4 and 5 whose playlist number is high – in the 60-80 song range. They have now outgrown the Playlist Management 1-4 book, and are struggling to adapt to not only keeping all these songs alive but also writing…
Play It Forward Practice Strategy
Dear Friends, I am spending 1/2 of a class time to introduce all my students who enter level 3 to start splitting their practice time into 2 sessions: Current Project and Playlist Project. With the Playlist Projects, I am introducing the Play It Forward (from…
Some Students’ Morale Declining
Dear Friends, I have been teaching SM for about 8 months. I have quite a few students who are losing interest playing the piano. They start out pretty good for the first 3 months but not quite keeping it up now. They lose their attention…
Lesson plan with multiple streams
There’re so many great supplemental programs available even for Level 1 now. I start to feel that it is very tight during lessons to use some of those supplemental programs when we already have variations/arrangement, and composition/improvisation. I would really love to give the students…
Requirement/Non-requirement based studios
I would like to ask a more philosophical, yet altogether practical question. At what point does a studio become a requirement or, non-requirement based studio. Where is the line? I would imagine every teacher would have their own set of requirements – many would be…
New idea: Remote Practice Management
I’ve got a question about a potentially new way to manage practicing. We think some of our prospects aren’t signing up for lessons because of the requirement that a parent be present in the lessons. Many parents today are quite busy and often say they…
Final Lesson
Hi everyone, wondering if anyone can share some insights on how to run a final lesson. I’m thinking of two particular scenarios: when it’s the last lesson with a student who is choosing to discontinue, or, more frequently, the last lesson before a bit of…
What is ‘Normal Progress’
In response to the following statement: “… It just seems wiser to wait until students can process almost a song a week…. Seems the intention of Simply Music is to have students playing right away…” Here is a paradox, and there is more to this…
Top 40 Playlist
I have a lot of students in the Development Levels (10-18). My requirement is that they have their “Top 40” or an hour’s worth of music that they can just sit down and play. I require them to keep a lot of the more…