Printables, Sheet Music

Student Christmas Gift: Original Piano Composition

Joy Morin

Hope you had a nice Christmas and are enjoying a break from teaching!

Now that Christmas is past, I can share about the gifts I made for my piano students this year.  🙂

As you may know, I love creating homemade gifts.  Last year, I home-recorded a CD of a few favorite classical teaching pieces. In 2012, I baked iced music cookies and in 2011 I created personalized glass sheet music ornaments.

For this year’s project, I decided to compose two pieces (one mid-elementary level and one late intermediate level) and give them to my students for Christmas.  Here is a peek at how the elementary piece turned out:

20141219_141906 NIKON web Continue reading “Student Christmas Gift: Original Piano Composition” →

Giveaways

December 2014 Giveaway Winners

Joy Morin

Announcing the randomly-chosen winners of the three giveaways last week:

Susan Crosser and Julie Lind are the winners of the Music Flash Class app by Henry Flurry.

Kristie is the winner of the Bobclass studio management app.

Geri is the winner of the “My Piano Trip to London” book by Elena Cobb.

Congrats to the winners! Watch your email inbox for an email from me.

Everyone else, I hope you will click the links above to consider purchasing these apps or books!

repertoire / methods, Reviews

Review & Giveaway: Elena Cobb’s “My Piano Trip To London”

Joy Morin

A couple of years ago, I reviewed some lovely sheet music by British teacher/composer Elena Cobb (read the review here). She is the author of the Higgledy Piggledy Jazz books, the “Blue River” book of solos, and more.

Elena has recently released a new book: a piano method called “My Piano Trip to London.”

1. COVER NEW FRONT

“My Piano Trip to London” contains 40 pages.  The pieces throughout the book are based on various landmarks and themes from London.

The first piece in the book is a black-key piece to be learned by rote.

Page 5 London Calling Student Continue reading “Review & Giveaway: Elena Cobb’s “My Piano Trip To London”” →

Reviews, Studio Business, Technology

App Review & Giveaway: Bobclass for Studio Management

Joy Morin

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Note: As you can tell, this week I’ve been playing catch-up with a few apps I’ve been wanting to share!  Hope you don’t mind all of the reviews/giveaways this week.  🙂

Bobclass ($19.99) — iPad only.

I’m so excited to share my review of this studio management app with you today!  Let me begin by sharing Bobclass’ description:

“Bobclass is an all-in-one productivity app for instructors, tutors, trainers, coaches and other independent professionals. It offers appointment scheduling, client tracking, progress monitoring and payment tracking from your iPad so you can get rid of separate agendas, clipboards and spreadsheets. With a fast & friendly user interface and a fully functional offline database you can do your client administration in the gym, class room, studio or park.”

I think Bobclass it is an outstanding studio management option for independent music teachers.  Here’s how it works:

First, visit the settings to set-up your basic information for you and your teaching.

2014-11-19 15.30.57 (1) Continue reading “App Review & Giveaway: Bobclass for Studio Management” →

Reviews, Technology

App Review & Giveaway: Music Flash Class

Joy Morin

Screen Shot 2014-12-16 at 12.44.33 PMMusic Flash Class ($3.99) — for iPhone/iPad.

Music Flash Class is an app developed by a piano teacher Henry Flurry.  It has been around for a couple of years now, but an update for iOS 8 was recently released.  The new layout looks good!

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Music Flash Class is an interactive note identification app.  The settings offer a myriad of options to customize the experience.  I love that you can chose to show or hide the timer.  And that you to choose a particular range of notes to practice.  Teachers can even customize and save their own “decks” of notes. Continue reading “App Review & Giveaway: Music Flash Class” →

Reviews

App Review — MusicNotes Deck: Music Flash Cards

Joy Morin

Screen Shot 2014-12-14 at 9.18.56 PMMusicNotes Deck: Music Flash Cards (FREE) — for iPad or iPhone.

This free app comes from the folks behind MusicNotes.com, which by the way, is an excellent website for purchasing arrangements of pop music at various levels for students.

The MusicNotes Deck app provides three decks of flash cards: (1) 50 music symbols/terms, (2) two octaves of treble clef note identification, and (3) two octaves of bass clef note identification.

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Please note that this app is NOT a game nor does it automatically correct answers in any way.  Instead, the app shows flashcard and allows the user to “turn over the flashcard” to see the answer on the back.  The app also can pronounce each term with either American or British pronunciation.

MusicNotes Deck

The flashcards are shuffled into a random order each time the app is loaded.

This app is a great way to study musical terms and symbols as well as practice note identification.  The graphics are gorgeous, too!

View it in the iTunes store here.

Music Theory, Worksheets

Worksheets: Matching Staff to Keyboard

Joy Morin

Have you ever had students correctly identify a note on the staff, but proceed to play the note in the wrong octave on the keyboard?  I think piano teachers all around the world can raise their hands on that one.  🙂

Being able to identify note names on the staff by letter name is important, but not as important as being able to instantly connect a note on the the staff to a particular piano key.  This is why, during flashcard drills or note-naming games, I require students to play the corresponding piano key as they give a verbal answer of the letter name.

With all of this in mind, I created a new set of worksheets that require students to draw a line to match notes on the staff to the corresponding piano key.  Although students may decide to figure out the letter names of the notes as they solve each problem, it is not the end goal — they must go a step further and connect the note to the keyboard.

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By arranging a series of notes on each staff (instead of just one note), my hope was that students would develop a stronger understanding of how intervals on the keyboard look when placed on the staff.  Read more about interval reading here.

Download the free PDF by visiting the Printables > Worksheets page and scrolling down to “Matching Staff to Keyboard Worksheets.”  There are five worksheets within the PDF, arranged in progressive order by difficulty.  The first worksheet uses only the landmark notes Bass F, Middle C, and Treble G.  The following worksheets each gradually increase the range of the notes on the staff.

  Matching Staff to Keyboard Worksheets (327.4 KiB, 29,174 hits)

Update: I’ve created a new digital version of this worksheet that can be completed digitally on your iPad/tablet.

Announcements

Winter Course Offering: Intro to Piano Teaching

Joy Morin

PIANO TEACHER INSTITUTE - join email list

I just sent out an email today to my mailing list for the Piano Teacher Institute online courses.  Below are the details to announce that I am preparing another session of the “Intro To Piano Teaching” course.  The dates for this online course will be January 5 through February 16.

This 6-week course is intended for piano teachers seeking to learn more about business topics, piano methods, pedagogy, and much more.  The ideal registrant is an individual with the willingness to spend at least 4-5 hours each week reading/studying the weekly topics and interacting with other registrants in forums and videochat discussions.  This highly intensive course is the perfect crash course for the new piano teacher or a great refresher for the experienced piano teacher.

Here are the weekly topics covered during the course:

  1. Business Sense — business structures, bookkeeping, taxes, marketing, and more. 
  2. On Teaching and Learning — teaching objectives, learning styles, and developmental stages. 
  3. Developing Music Literacy in Students — music literacy, music education philosophies, a history and overview of current piano methods. 
  4. Piano Technique for Beginners — developing posture, hand shape, fingering, pedaling, and more. 
  5. Finding and Choosing Repertoire — leveling, publishers, anthologies, editions and more. 
  6. Lesson/Curriculum Planning — leading the lesson, making assignment sheets, effective practicing, and planning long-term for students.

You can learn more about the course and read testimonials by visiting institute.joymorin.com.

Registration will open on Monday, December 15 at 9am Eastern time, one week from today.  Registration will automatically close after the first ten teachers have registered.  Registration usually fills within 24 hours, so if you are determined to take the course I would advise that you mark your calendar and be timely about watching the registration page.

After the Winter 2015 offering, I anticipate that the next course offering will occur Summer 2015.

Thanks for your interest, friends!

Announcements

Studio Project: Musical Christmas Paper Chain

Joy Morin

I love Christmastime for many reasons.

As a piano teacher, I love that it gives students the opportunity to play a variety of familiar tunes.  Playing tunes that are already in their ears really helps build their music reading skills.

I keep a lending library of Christmas books and loan them out to students each year.  I give students a book that is at or slightly below their current playing level so that they can quickly and easily learn a few selections from their book.

This year, I added a new tradition: When students complete a piece, they get to sign their autograph and write “2014” in the Christmas book.  It will be fun for students to see the names of students who learned the pieces in previous years.

Last year, we started a different tradition: a studio-wide project to build a paper chain to decorate the studio.  The idea is that when a student learns a Christmas piece, they get to add a paper strip to the chain.  It is a fun collaborative, inclusive project that allows the entire studio to participate.

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[Credit: I gained both of these ideas from a Facebook forum for piano teachers.]

This year, I created this simple PDF sign to explain the project.

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Feel free to download this PDF on the Printables > Other Resources page (near the M’s as “Musical Christmas Chain project.”), or here:

  Musical Christmas Chain Project (155.5 KiB, 4,910 hits)

Learning all those Christmas pieces during December will be useful for the January Piano Party, when students will each perform a holiday piece.  As students perform for each other, we will play “Name That Tune.”  Students keep track of their guesses on this worksheet and mark the stars for each correct answer at the end.

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Click here to read more about the January Piano Party from 2013.

You can download the Name-That-Tune worksheet by visiting the Printables > Games page and scrolling down to “Name-That-Tune – Christmas Edition”, or here:

  Name-That-Tune - Christmas Edition (45.6 KiB, 6,436 hits)

I hope you and your students are enjoying the holiday season!