Join This Special Piano Teaching Project
One of the things I love about you ComposeCreate readers is that you are all generous and love to share your ideas! Well, I’d like to invite you to be a part of a special project that could be amazingly helpful all piano teachers. I’d like to invite you to share what you are learning about “what your students love” and how you are using it to teach music concepts differently.
If you’ve been a newsletter subscriber since August, you’ll probably remember the “Get to Know Me, Teacher” resource I gave to you as part of our back-to-school fun. It was a way to find out what your students love, organize that, and then use this to help you teach creatively. I thought it might be fun to make a special list of analogies that connect 21st Century children’s interests to music concepts.
How to use what kids love to teach piano differently
For example, in the blog post where I gave away the resource, I relayed this story about how I used the knowledge that a student loved the Lord of the Rings to help teach this concept:
A while back, I was giving my own son a piano lesson. He was playing an introductory minuet in a very heavy and non-musical way. I asked him to play it lighter, which resulted in only a very small change. But then I remember that he loves the Lord of the Rings, so I said, “You know, the way you are playing it right now sounds like Gimli the Dwarf. Can you instead play it as if you are Legolas the Elf traveling like air through the forest?”
As I said in the post, it made a huge impact on his playing (and his excitement for lessons immediately skyrocketed). The reason this worked is because I entered his world instead of requiring that he enter my world to learn.
In a workshop I gave on Saturday for the Mid-Missouri MTA, one teacher relayed this story:
I was baffled that my student just couldn’t get 6/8 timing, but then I remembered that kids like to skip. So, I told him to get off the bench and skip around the room. He came back and played the 6/8 rhythms perfectly. The rhythm of skipping is perfect for 6/8!
Share your idea below
So, I’d like to invite you, my generous music teaching readers, to share what you are learning about what kids like and teaching a musical concepts with these ideas. Don’t worry if you don’t have any stories to share yet. Simply answer the first question and tell me what you’ve discovered that kids are “into.”
If there is a good response, I’d like to compile these ideas into a blog post and perhaps into a downloadable printable. Wouldn’t we all benefit if we had a list of ways to use 21st Century student’s interest for teaching music concepts?
Share this project with your teaching friends! The more teachers that participate, the better!
Thank you!
