How to Teach Beginner Piano Students
Ignite excitement at the piano easily with this FREE lesson plan
Check out this video preview
What is the best way to teach beginner piano students and to inspire, engage and motivate them in their first lesson?
Is it through opening a method book and teaching students how to read middle C?
Or, is it through:
We believe beginner piano lessons should be the most exciting, creative and engaging lessons you teach. It is your chance to ignite excitement at the piano for your student.
And you can do it all without even touching a method book.
The No Book Beginners (NBB) Framework is designed to give you enough ideas to teach beginners for 10-weeks (or more) without a book before you start to teach reading with your favourite method book.
Many studies suggest that the best way to teach music is firstly through listening, copying, singing, creating and exploring well before anything to do with reading and writing.
It’s the same way that we learn to speak our native language. You’d never think of teaching a child to read and write before they can speak and improvise in their language, so why do we do it for music?
Check out
the videoat the top of the page for a scaffold of ideas for your own teaching. It will give you lots of ideas so that you can expand your current teaching methods by adding creative activities.
These activities will ensure your beginner piano students are:
Set up with the basics of technique, sitting position and knowledge of the keyboard
Immersed in creative music-making activities that will hopefully continue for a lifetime
Challenged to explore music
Curious about how music works
Your students will be given the fundamentals and feel it in their bodies
Meter
Rhythm
Tempo
They’ll be able to…
transpose tunes
hear and understand harmony
listen, sing and pitch-match from the beginning
And they’ll be 100% engaged and having fun with music before they start the next phase: reading.
This Framework is designed for teaching beginner piano students around 7-11 years old, having 30-45 minute weekly lessons and is designed for teachers working 1-on-1 with students in a private studio setting, but could easily be adapted to work in classroom and group settings.
It can work alongside your current teaching style, or you could try it as a replacement for a student. It’s totally up to you how you’d like to use it. I’m not precious about how my ideas are used and you’ll need to adapt it to suit your student in any case!
Fill the form below to get your lesson plan and print it out to follow along. Feel free to pause the video while you get it ready!
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