For 30 minutes every week, your job as a piano teacher is to be the most engaging person on the face of the earth.
You want to WOW your students with creative activities, clever strategies, and fantastic music.
While accomplishing this task, you probably feel like the ringmaster in a three-ring circus.
But when piano students get home, it’s time for the circus to stop.
As students usually do piano homework independently, their at-home tasks must be short, simple-to-follow, and easy to understand.
And that is why, next week, we are launching our third book in our piano student workbook series…
Andrea And Trevor Dow’s Technical Exercises For Note Reading Success, Book 1.
Keep reading to learn more about this homework book that is jam-packed with 226 technical exercises for young students working in middle C position and C position.
Most piano students are assigned repertoire to work on at home. But repertoire should only make up one part of a piano student’s weekly assignments.
Students need to be working on short technical exercises that can be completed quickly and without frustration.
And that’s what we are delivering in Andrea And Trevor Dow’s Technical Exercises For Note Reading Success, Book 1: 226 Primer Piano Exercises In Middle C Position And C Position.
The 226 technical exercises in this book are scaffolded to ensure note reading success.
Using a careful introduction of notes, students begin playing simple exercises using only B, Middle C, and D and continue through a year’s worth of exercises until they play hands together using all notes in the C Five-Finger Scale.
To begin, this book is HUGE. With over 100 pages and 226 technical exercises, you WILL have to crack the spine 🙂
But that’s what it takes to develop young piano players.
Most technical exercise books for primer and level 1 students have less than 30 pages containing loosely-leveled exercises without any clear introduction of notes.
As mentioned earlier, Andrea And Trevor Dow’s Technical Exercises For Note Reading Success, Book 1 follows the progression of most primer piano books so that your students are playing technical exercises with specific notes sets as they are learned.
But there is more to this book than just its size!
1. Traditional Technical Exercises
Using short, scaffolded exercises, your students will learn to read notes as they play, while also improving their finger strength and coordination. These exercises have been carefully composed to ensure students learn to step and skip up and down the keys in parallel motion and contrary motion.
2. Sight Reading Exercises
If you follow us regularly, you know that we are passionate about our pick-a-path approach to sight reading. Our unique-to-us invention ensures students learn to read notation using their knowledge of notes rather than merely relying on muscle memory.
3. Lap-Clap Rhythm Training
Rhythm training must be a.part of any piano student’s homework repertoire. Using our engaging Lap-Clap body percussion approach to rhythm training, your students will have a blast reinforcing their skills away from the piano.
4. Move And Groove Exercises
Some books move students’ hands all over the keyboard, while other books lock their hands into positions and never let them go! We think that there are benefits to both approaches, so, in this book, each unit contains Move And Groove Exercises that help students get used to playing out of position.
5. Challenge Exercises
Some piano students excel when presented with a challenge. The last section of each unit in this book contains accelerated exercises that you can use with students who are progressing quickly or who are older than your typical primer student.
Andrea And Trevor Dow’s Technical Exercises For Note Reading Success, Book 1: 226 Primer Piano Exercises In Middle C Position and C Position is due for release next week.
On Thursday, right here on the blog, we’ll share a “look inside” preview, so be sure to check back soon.
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