If you’re an MTNA member with an established studio and teaching professionally for no more than three years, consider applying for the MarySue Harris Studio Teacher Fellowship. It’s a wonderful opportunity for new teachers and one I wish I knew about when I first started my studio.
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You guys, I have developed a serious hobby of creating playlists on Spotify. My husband gets the biggest kick out of it. Over Fall break last week we traveled to Virginia Beach for a speaking session on digital management strategies I gave to a local group there. On the way home I created two: Indiana, My State, and Halloween.
The growth of MTNA’s business resources has been an important focus and implementation for current president Karen Thickstun.
One of the first projects (that I know of) was developing the Business Resources section of the MTNA website.
After Karen started her MTNA Presidency this past March, she passed the reigns on the new Email Business Digest to Beth Klingenstein.
You all likely know me well enough that piano teacher resources are the name of my game as I’ve been writing the weekly Friday Finds series since the blog started!
Thus, I have joined a team of several other teachers led by Beth to bring you this quarterly digest!
I’m working on two sections: “Resource Gems” (along with fellow teacher Jennifer Walschap), and “Technology Tips and Tools” (along with fellow teacher Jennifer Stadler)
I hope you will find these resources to be invaluable for running your own independent music studio!
If you’re not a member of MTNA, consider joining today!
One of the tools in this series is a pretty cool magnet board which, after having a look myself on her recommendation, inspired this week’s finds. First of all, I thought it might be nice to hear directly from this reader on why she loves Easy Notes.
I have recently found and love Easy Notes by Rebecca Wilson (find it at wilbecks.com). There are two workbooks, as well as charming character magnet manipulatives. I have used mnemonics, not because I thought it was the way to go, but because I didn’t know there was a better way (yes, I use intervals some too).
Easy Notes teaches note names (four octaves) through stories. It’s simple and whimsical, and the students really like it. Most importantly, it is making a difference in their note reading.
I only happened upon her and her new creation when I watched a webinar. I think she’s from New Zealand. The workbooks used to be $10 each but are now $18 each, but I recommend the Easy Notes Teachers Kit (with Large Magnetic Stave) for $109.99. The Easy Note Student Kit (with Small Magnetic Stave) is $99.99, is fine, too, but I just like having more space between the treble and bass staff.
This was the first magnet board I purchased. I love that it’s compact, double-sided, and has multi-colored magnets that come along with it. I did find the space above and below the staff a bit cramped for teaching ledger line notes though.
Lots of other great resources available on this site as well.
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After E-Z Notes, my next find for a magnet board was from Musical Escapades. Similar to E-Z notes, I like the compact size of the board and multi-colored magnets that accompany it. It’s not doubled-sided like E-Z notes but there is more space for ledger line notes.
I find both the E-Z Notes and Musical Escapades staff board magnets to be a bit small to manipulate but with the more compact size, that’s to be expected.
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MusicToolsLady.com, besides a staff magnet board she also has a great music note slider tool as well.
Due to the popularity of this download as well as the recent release of my new book Christmas by Ear: 8 Tunes to Harmonize, I thought now was a perfect time to share with you a FREE handy quick reference guide of Christmas tunes to harmonize!
Each of the 20 tunes included are well-known traditional ones that are in the public domain.
Often, students are happy to play only a portion of a favorite tune. While many Christmas tunes have a little more complicated harmonizations, sometimes the opening portion or the chords are more simplified. For this reason, a few are listed twice.
For example, you can harmonize the open two phrases of Deck the Halls using only tonic and dominant. Many’s students might get a kick out of being able to play even a few phrases of favorite tunes by ear without having to learn the whole thing!
Here are a couple of quick ideas on how you could use it:
Pull it out when students forget their materials or haven’t practiced enough on their pieces.
Practice harmonizing these tunes on your own to develop your own ear!
Have students choose one piece off the list that they’re not learning as part of their Christmas repertoire and have them work on playing chords while they sing! One of my favorite first steps with students is to play root position chords in the RH and either chord roots or root octaves in the LH.
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With this week’s launch of my new Christmas by Ear: 8 Tunes to Harmonize book, I thought it would be fitting for this week’s finds to continue on the theme of harmonizing and playing by ear. 🙂
P.S. There’s a 15% off launch celebration discount going on that will end on Oct. 26 so don’t delay in getting your copy!
I know playing by ear can be a hard topic – it’s something I struggle with every day myself. If we do anything with our students on playing by hearing though as piano teachers, let it be about them playing “Happy Birthday“.
Just this week I had one of my 6th-grade students excitedly tell me about how she gets to be part of the middle school show choir now. In their first practice, the teacher asked if anyone could play the piano. After stating she did, the class (of course!) asked her to play something. What did she play? Happy Birthday! She was SO PROUD she could sit down and do that!
While I’ve had a small handful of students over the years that have incredibly strong ears for playing music by ear, this little guy is probably one of the best. He amazes me at every lesson! Hear him play “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in 12 keys.
Teacher: “Billy, do you want to play any Christmas music this year?”
Billy: “Eh, no not really.”
Am I right when I say this is a phrase you rarely if ever hear from piano students? 🙂
I would suffice to say that Christmas is the time of year when many students get mostpassionate about what they want to play. Some have quite strong feelings about what favorite Christmas tunes they want to play and some just want to play as much as they possibly can.
Today I’m excited to share with you a new Christmas book that is unlike any otherChristmas book for piano students.
I’m confident that you’ll not only find it to be completely unique, but incredibly versatile as well.
What is it?
It’s a book of 8 Christmas tunes to harmonize and play by ear including:
I Saw Three Ships
Away in a Manger
Silent Night
Up On the Housetop
Go Tell it On the Mountain
Jingle Bells
Joy to the World
The First Noel
Goals of this Book
The overarching goal of this book is to enable piano students to feel like they can sit down and play some of their favorite Christmas tunes anywhere and at any time without notation in front of them.
Many students find great joy in the annual musical feast that comes around each year making it a great opportunity for the development of life-long musicianship skills.
Students will be encouraged to discern between duple vs. triple meters and major vs. minor tonalities, learn to harmonize using chords, play in a variety of keys, use several accompaniment patterns, and more.
The format encourages the development of audiation, improvisation, and creativity skills by presenting multi-level steps/variations on playing each tune. Each song includes its own checklist so students can use and build on these sheets year after year as their skills progress.
Besides developing skills for playing by ear and playing tunes in a variety of ways, students are also gaining the valuable skill of learning how to play from a chord chart in any key.
Think of it kind of like “build-a-bear” – students are “building-a-book” of Christmas music! 🙂
This post is part of a series called Your Questions Answered that highlights questions from readers just like you. If you have a question you would like to submit, you can do so here.
Hi Amy!
Do you have favorite collections of Christmas music for your students?
My middle kid wants me to get out ‘the’ Christmas music book (we have a very old primer from my in-laws).
I told him he had to learn two new songs from a non-Christmas book before I would think about that. So, he sat down and sight-read the whole Faber Piano Adventures, Level 2A Performance book. (I guess the desire for Christmas music was a good motivator!) So, I’m going to get the Faber Christmas books for levels 2 and 3.
But first of all, bravo to you for finding a way to light the fire for your kiddo! It sounds like you’re probably headed in the right direction.
As far as Faber goes, I don’t know if you intend on doing the Christmas books that correlate to the student library or the ones that are part of the “Show Time,” “Big Time,” and “Play Time” series. While either is fine, my personal preference is the latter.
Each book has a lot of music. The first 1/3 of book 1 is labeled as “beginning Christmas songs: easy arrangements with simple harmonies.” Section 2 has 13 pieces labeled as “Christmas songs in the key of C Major with I, IV, and V7 chords) and Section 3 is the same but in the key of G Major.
Due to the primary-chord structure and keys included, I would say book one is leveled with the student library up to level 3A.
I started trying some of Piano Pronto’s holiday books in the last couple of years. I haven’t used any of them long enough to say they’re ones I return to “year after year,” but there are some unique little finds. In particular, you might consider the Multi-Level Holiday Classics, which includes three difficulty levels for each piece.
Some of my older students enjoyed the arrangements in Christmas Classics: Contemporary Lyrical Solos. That book would probably not be his best next step, but I still wanted to mention it.
This post is part of a series called Your Questions Answered that highlights questions from readers just like you. If you have a question you would like to submit, you can do so here.
Good afternoon Amy,
I am wondering what your favorite method is to use? Why? Also what book do you use for theory. I appreciate your articles so I thought I would ask.
Thank you, Shirlee
Hi, Shirlee!
My favorite theory book series right now is the Celebrate Theory from The Royal Conservatory. Some of the things I like about it include:
They’re clean, and uncluttered, and the covers are colorful.
They’re well written and nicely laid out.
At the end of every unit, students are asked to explore an excerpt of music (printed in the book) and answer questions in regards to what they see in the score.
Generally, this is when I have multiple students from one family. In order to avoid siblings comparing themselves, I like to keep them in different series. Otherwise, Celebrate Theory is what all my students get.
As far as the favorite method goes, it’s a much more involved answer as I have used it a lot over the years!
This series isn’t your traditional piano method however as it’s based on Music Learning Theory by Edwin E. Gordon.
That is, it uses an audiation-based approach to teaching music. Notation is not introduced the right way as in traditional methods.
It is full of a lot of singing, movement, and aural activities such as hearing the difference between duple vs. triple meter and major vs. minor tonality and building a vocabulary of rhythm of tonal patterns.
The pieces are very short and easily digestible. When I first started using this series that was actually a turn-off for me but I have found that my students really enjoy the pieces and it was more my issue than theirs!
Piano Adventures by Randall and Nancy Faber
While I’ve used the entire series with students in the past, currently, I mostly use book 1.
Very few of my students start one series and complete the whole thing, I tend to supplement a lot and zig-zag in and out of books and levels.
Level 1 of Piano Adventures is a winner though. It has a lot of really great pieces students love!
~Amy
What method and theory books do you use and love? Share in the comments!
Hold onto your hats – I have a whole lot of goodies for you this month. I’m pretty sure this is one of – if not THE biggest list I’ve ever published!
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Julie Knerr shared a lovely series of photos by her mother that, in 5 images, display the steps it takes to bring a painting from a sketch to a work of art. Use these images as a synonym for your students taking pieces from just learning to polished performance.
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Unfortunately, Teach Piano Today has discontinued its Piano Game Club! The page is still live, but you are no longer able to sign up. It was announced in an email directly to current subscribers.
I’ve been catching up on Nadia Bolz-Weber’s podcast (which is not currently active), The Confessional. One episode almost brought me to tears – Meg Lavery, Storyteller, and Teacher.
It’s time to give my kitchen towels a spiff up. I’m going to use this technique with Oxi Clean recommended by America’s Test Kitchen and subsequently The Kitchn.
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With the turnover of the new season this week, amplify your fall time mood with my Autumn playlist on Spotify.
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Joy Morin came up with a simple and yet brilliant incentive program for her students.
Since we moved into our new house, I’ve discovered rather than keeping all my books in one location on a designated bookshelf, I love keeping them in small groups in a location that fits their theme.
For example, I keep books about having a welcoming home on the kitchen windowsill, books on Music Learning Theory next to my desk, books on learning and personal growth in the stairwell going to my studio so my students see them, and so forth.
Of course, it doesn’t help that I don’t actually have a big enough bookcase to keep all of them in one location but even so, I still love the idea of theme areas!
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Natalie Weber discovered a piece that worked brilliantly as a rote piece for a student who desperately needed it. She shared it along with how she is organizing her rote repertoire both physically (and in Evernote!)
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Are you interested in learning more about Music Learning Theory? Did you know I have a whole page here on Piano Pantry dedicated to MLT resources? Find a list of recommended books, a series of some of my favorite YouTube videos on the topic, podcast episodes, and more!
One resource I recently added was a podcast from Musicality Now: Mind Before Fingers with Marilyn Lowe. I thought this was one of the best I’ve heard from Marilyn.
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One of my former students is an avid songwriter. Follower her on Instagram for wonderful monthly songwriting prompts!
Congratulations to Christopher Goldston on the launch of his new website where he’s self-publishing his own compositions as well as (potentially) some unseen solos from his mother, Margaret Goldston!
If you subscribe to and use My Music Staff for your music studio, they have a feature in the calendar that, with one click, will add your studio calendar from My Music Staff to your personal cloud calendar (such as Google or iCloud).
I don’t utilize the MMS calendar for my studio schedule, so all that shows up there is the student’s birthdays. You may still like this feature, even if you have your entire studio schedule!
My Music Staff has a help article available to show you how to set this up, but I thought it might be helpful to highlight the feature here and include some screenshots for an easy visual. (Click on the image to enlarge if needed.)
Remember that I use Google Calendar, so yours may feel slightly different.
1) Navigate to the Calendar from the sidebar in My Music Staff, then clear to the right, click on the purple “Set up Sync” button.
2) Select which calendar you use.
3) It will automatically open your calendar with the proper link. Click “Add”
4) In Google Calendar, it will show up under “Other calendars.” Click on the three dots on the right to rename the calendar or change the calendar color.
It may take 24 hours for them to sync, but they will show up!
Here, I’ve toggled all my other calendars off just to show the student birthdays.
More on Student Birthday Cards
If you would like to read more about doing student birthday cards/postcards, check out these posts:
(I guess the desire for Christmas music was a good motivator!) So, I’m going to get the Faber Christmas books for levels 2 and 3.
My favorite theory book series right now is the 
