When I first started teaching I had a student called Daniel. If I’m honest he wasn’t particularly passionate about piano and was only really doing it because his parents wanted him to. We got on well and always had a good lesson but I knew he would much rather have been playing football. In those…
Emily collapsed theatrically onto the piano stool and we both giggled! “Tiring day?”, I enquired and nodding her head she proceeded to tell me all about her maths test and that PE had been “awful” as the teacher made them run around the field “ten times!”. Making sympathetic noises, I realised the lesson would be…
Just love what you are doing, and try to play more Lang Lang It is the school holidays here this week so my students are having a break from lessons. It’s the perfect time for me to catch up on my own playing and I’m really enjoying practising. What music do you currently have on…
There are so many ways to play with dice in a music lesson! Just recently I have been using Google Dice which is a really handy tool, but I always have a real dice next to the piano to add some extra fun to learning. Here are some of the ways I use them: I’d…
Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand Carl Orff Have you ever had students who learn about something one week, but at the following lesson it’s as though they had never encountered it before? At last weeks lesson you taught Ben about tones and semitones, for example, and he seemed…
Spoon-feeding, in the long run, teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon E.M.Forster If you think about it, contact time with students is very small. An average lesson is often between 30 minutes to an hour a week, leaving lots of time in between for students to work on their own. As a…
Perfectionism kills art. I find that if I criticise myself, it spoils the fun. You can get paralysed by analysis – it takes all the playfulness away Geri Halliwell Do you teach any perfectionists? A few years ago I inherited a piano student who was at the more extreme end of the scale. With one…
I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories. Nat King Cole What a fantastic quote! Once upon a time, I was preparing a student for her exam! Everything was in place. All the notes and rhythms were correct but there was something missing. So…
It’s been a year full of music fun and adventures at Learnatune Games and I hope your students have enjoyed playing as much as mine have! Wishing everyone a happy and peaceful holiday season and looking forward to sharing more games in 2023.
Following on from the (totally serious!) blog post earlier about the ‘secret’ of playing the piano, I have found some great advice for flautists. If you want to improve then take the advice of James Galway … The quickest way to unlock your talent is to take the flute out of the box James Galway…
If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn Estrada Years ago it was normal for teachers to stand in front of a class of silent students and present what was to be learnt that day. Everyone was taught exactly the same thing in exactly the same…
I teach a lot of young students and we often use music games to reinforce what they are learning (as you may have gathered from my website!). I’ve noticed recently that you can actually tell a lot about a student’s learning style just by playing a game. Recently, for example, I was helping someone with time…
