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Sonder Music: Piano Lessons in Norman, OK
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Make Way for Mischief

3/28/2017

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Very excited to announce the release of two elementary solos, designed to be taught by rote/ear, Make Way for Mischief and Cold Blast, available at laurensonder.com!
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Horizontal Staff

8/23/2015

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Horizontal Staff
Reading piano music is a complex activity for many reasons. One of the biggest challenges beginners face is correlating notes that go up and down on the staff to keys that go "up and down" (right and left) on the keyboard. One teaching aid that I and many other teachers have found helpful is the "sideways" or horizontal staff. By turning the staff 90 degrees, students can more directly see how the staff and keys are related. Obviously, the staff can't stay that way, but seeing it turned on its side can help students make the connection even when it resumes its usual vertical form.

In 2013, I decided to make a large horizontal staff with "notes" (colored squares) that actually lined up with the corresponding keys on the keyboard. I color coded the squares to match some wooden letter beads I'd bought. Unfortunately, the bead set is no longer available for purchase (and I lost my pink "G" bead!). It's not hard to get your hands on pink, blue, and purple Post-it notes or highlighter tape though, if you like the color matching idea!

I've linked to two files below: an oversized PDF file that can either be printed on a large printer like a plotter or tiled over six 8.5 x 11" pages (see below), as well as an 8.5 x 11" PDF version that includes a printed keyboard.

Horizontal Staff PDF - Oversized (22 x 13")
Horizontal Staff PDF - Letter Size (8.5 x 11")

You are welcome to use these files in your studio and send them home with students for home use! I only ask that you not redistribute or alter them. Please share how you are using them in the comments!

Printing the Oversized PDF at Home:
You can print the oversized file in Adobe Acrobat Reader using 8.5 x 11" paper using by tiling it over 6 pages and trimming carefully!

Screenshot
Tiled Horizontal Staff
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How To Make Your Own Velcro Staff

8/11/2015

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A couple years ago, I made my own Velcro staff to use with my students. It's come in handy for many activities, from identifying landmark notes to melodic transcription. It is sturdy, lightweight, and sits easily on my upright piano's music stand. I've posted instructions below on how to make your own. If you do, please let me know how it turns out!
DIY Velcro Staff
Add Velcro adhesive to music symbols, seasonal stickers, felt or foam dots... the possibilities are endless!
You'll Need:
  • One piece of 20x30" black foam board; it should be 3/16" thick, and ideally have faint gray grid lines
  • 35' of 1 1/4" white adhesive Velcro tape (I used 7 packages of Velcro Removable Hanging Strip; each package comes with a 5' x 1 1/4" removable adhesive Velcro hanging strip and twelve adhesive 7/8" Velcro circles)
  • One 20x30" poster frame
  • Music symbols printed to size (I used Trend Brand Music Symbols Classic Accents® Variety Pack)
Directions:
  1. Cut fourteen 30" x 1 1/4" strips of adhesive Velcro tape. If you use the 5' Velcro Removable Hanging Strips, you can simply cut them each in half.
  2. Adhere the first strip to the top of the foam board, making it completely flush with the long, 30" edge. Leave a 1/4" gap before placing the second strip below. This gap forms the first staff line. It is very important that each staff line have an exactly 1/4" gap. Continue adding strips until the top staff complete. Create the middle of the grand staff by placing four strips flush against each other. Create the bottom staff by leaving gaps again for the remaining 5 lines. If you've measured your gaps correctly, the final strip will end up flush with the bottom of the foam board. The nice thing about the Velcro Removable Hanging Strips is that they are repositionable, so if one isn't lined up quite right, you can just remove and reposition it. Faint gray grid lines on the black foam board help too. You could also draw lines with pencil if your foam board doesn't come with grid lines. 
  3. Once all your strips are placed, take the four plastic frame edges off of a 20x30" poster frame and slide them over the edges of your foam board. This gives the board stability and keeps the adhesive strip edges from peeling off.
  4. The Trend Brand music symbols (pictured above) fit perfectly on this staff. The only exception is that the treble and bass clefs are a bit too small, as you can see. However, you can always draw larger ones, and/or download and print larger clef images. I haven't had a chance to make this "upgrade" yet! I did laminate the music symbols to give them durability. Then I placed the adhesive Velcro circles that came with the Hanging Strips on the back of the laminated music symbols, as well as on stickers (with the peel still on) and felt dots (with cardboard backing). 
  5. It's easy to make bar lines and ledger lines by cutting thin strips of basic black Velcro, available in the hardware section of many stores.

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The Grasshopper and the Cricket

6/19/2015

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My student really enjoyed this piece from Tales of a Musical Journey Book 2, called The Grasshopper. I added a simple treble duet with quirky grace notes, which she thought sounded like a cricket. Fun for both of us :-)
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About practicing...

6/2/2015

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This post is a modified version of an "About Practicing" handout I recently made for parents of my piano students. A lot of prospective have questions about what home piano practice looks like. Endless amounts could be (and have been) written on this topic, but here are some helpful basics to keep in mind:

How much should students practice?
Daily, quality practice is essential to a student's progress and enjoyment in piano. Unlike other activities for children, which are often scheduled 2-3x a week, piano lessons are generally scheduled only once a week, so reinforcement at home is very necessary.  In my studio, I give the following guidelines:
  • Beginner level students should practice approximately 20-30 minutes a day.
  • Early intermediate level students should practice approximately 40-60 minutes a day.
  • Late intermediate/advanced level students should practice approximately 60 minutes a day or more.
These are basic guidelines, but frequency is more important than duration, and practice must be meaningful to be effective. Students should try to get in at least a small amount of meaningful practice each day, at a time that they are able to concentrate.  Which brings us to...

What is meaningful practice?
Meaningful practice is, essentially, practice that helps reinforce concepts learned in the lesson. It is extremely helpful for students to practice immediately after their lesson, or the very next day, to reinforce what they just learned. Students may need to be reminded to work on the assigned goals for each piece. Simply playing through pieces without specific goals in mind is not meaningful practice.

What about repetition? How many times should a student play each piece (or phrase or section)?
Students rarely do their best work on their first try. Repetition is important for improvement, but it helps to focus on improving one thing per repetition. Point out positives before reminding students about something they forgot to do or still need to work on.

Sometimes my child just wants to “mess around” on the piano and make up their own songs. How can I get them to focus on their assignments?
Messing around (improvising) on the piano is a wonderful activity with many benefits and should not be discouraged. Remind your child that they may only have a certain amount of time to play the piano (before it's time for dinner, for example) and that they need to make sure they have time for their lesson assignments too, so that they can get better at playing the piano.


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Chase

5/19/2015

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Another YOYO piece for Willow by Elissa Milne:
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Feeling Volume Changes

4/29/2015

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It can be a big challenge for a young beginner to connect with music notation. There are so many elements: pitch, rhythm, tempo, fingering, dynamics... Students often accidentally leave out dynamics when first playing through a piece. Sometimes the best thing to do is to help them feel the dynamics away from the page. Here's an exercise I recently used: I drew a "dynamics map" of the student's piece using the signs for crescendo and diminuendo. We listened to a recording of their piece and shaded in the dynamics shapes as the music played--making bigger crayon strokes as it got louder and smaller strokes as it got softer. It's great that the shapes we used were actual music notation symbols, but it would work well whether students had already learned these symbols or not!

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Water Themed Duets

4/26/2015

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Had a lot of fun playing duets with Jennifer Tripi at the Norman Public Library last week. We wore blue tulle in our hair to represent water, since we were playing two water themed pieces: En Bateau by Debussy and Night by the Sea by MacDowell. Thanks to Mary Sallee and the Norman Area Music Teachers Association for putting this event together!
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    Lauren's Blog

    Thoughts on Piano Teaching

    Lauren Sonder
    Lauren Sonder is a piano teacher in Norman, OK.
    She loves to apply creative teaching techniques to help students get the most out of their lessons.

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"My daughter has been studying piano with Lauren since age 7, and now she's 14. Her experiences have included the development of great technique, practice skills, and artistic sensitivity; developing proficiency in improvisation, composition, and transcription, performing solos and duets, and learning to accompany her own vocals. She has learned repertoire from a wide range of genres and composers. She has benefited greatly from Lauren's individualized approach, and I am thoroughly pleased with the results."

- Miranda A., Parent of Sonder Music Piano Studio
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Sonder Music Piano Studio / Norman, OK 73069
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