Sonder Music: Piano Lessons in Norman, OK
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Step One: Listen

9/9/2021

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It’s Monday evening and your child has a piano lesson tomorrow. You didn’t get any practice in this week (or hardly any), but you still want to do what you can at this late hour to help your child have a good lesson tomorrow. Keeping in mind you don’t have much time left in the day, you look at their assignments (probably 5 or 6 different things) and decide to pick one piece to focus on. Rather than get into the details of the assignment, you ask your child to practice it once or twice before bed. At least you’ve done something before lesson day!!

Your instinct to help your child get ready for their lesson even though they didn’t have a good practice week is awesome! But let’s talk about the execution. If your child hasn’t thought about their pieces since their last lesson, just diving in and playing a piece without going through the details of the assignment isn’t likely to yield good results. In fact, they may even be reinforcing bad habits. 

So, what do you do when you only have 15 minutes between dinner and bath time to practice the night before the lesson? Listen, listen, listen. Have your child listen to all their pieces. If you’re in my studio, you likely have multiple listening assignments on any given week, but they are usually not long. Practicing the piece at the piano is almost always Step Two of the assignment, not Step One. So, if you don’t have much time, just do Step One. On the couch! Or even in the car while driving to the lesson! Your child will come to their lesson with all their pieces fresh in their ear and mind, ready to learn! 

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Essential Piano Posture

3/27/2020

 
What is Essential Piano Posture? 
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  • Elbows slightly in front of torso
  • Bottom of elbow is at the same level as top of white keys
  • Sitting on the front half of the bench
  • Feet flat on the floor, or flat, solid surface.

Making sure your child is set up at the piano correctly will make a world of difference in their comfort and piano technique!

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A Teaching Transition

7/5/2019

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In my many years of teaching private piano lessons, I always prided myself on treating each and every piano student as an individual, with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. In fact, offering individualized instruction was the core value I wanted people to take away about my studio: I won’t put your child in a box. I won’t expect them to learn the same way as every other child. I won’t assign them the same pieces in the same order as all my other students. I want your child to love music and will make sure there are no arbitrary obstacles in their path.

I taught with this individualized instruction mindset for about 10 years (and loved it). I actively learned about my students' worlds and carefully observed the ways each seemed to learn best. And then I adjusted my teaching accordingly, guiding each student along a customized path I made just for them.

Then, in the summer of 2018, I met Marilyn White Lowe, author of the audiation based piano method, Music Moves for Piano. It was a pleasure to hear her speak about teaching in small groups, and her flexible, open door policy, where students were welcome to stay late and make music with other students during the next scheduled lesson. She explained the benefits of children learning in groups: how the older and more experienced students naturally became leaders and the younger and less experienced students were inspired, challenged, and supported.

I started to wonder… was designing a unique learning path for each individual student really the best thing for them? Or were they missing out on an important social aspect of learning I’d never fully considered?

I was already a piano teacher who, like many others, organized periodic group piano classes for my private students. I also paired students for duet projects from time to time. But I was inspired to try something more like what Marilyn described and started to research small group piano teaching. She and others offered lots of great ideas about how to teach in groups and I became even more convinced that I wanted to give it a try. But I also knew I didn't want to lose the benefits that an individual focus can provide. After some consideration, I decided to offer 75 minute group lessons that were approximately 50% group activities and approximately 50% one-on-one time.

Now, when you talk about giving students one-on-one time in a group piano lesson, many people envision a keyboard lab model, with students practicing with headphones on and the teacher visiting each student. I knew without a doubt that was not for me. I strongly believe that piano learning should be done on acoustic pianos, and also wasn’t the whole point of a group lesson that the students be learning from each other? So I settled on "project time/one-on-one time." During the second half of the lesson, students would work on focused projects while taking turns having one-on-one time at the piano. 

I offered this new lesson option to my students starting in August of 2018 and many students agreed to try it. I was so grateful to the families who trusted me enough to take the leap! Fast forward to July of 2019 and I've taught in this new way with four small groups for almost a year now. While certainly challenging, it has been immensely gratifying. Here are some of things I've learned this year:

There is nothing like the joy of making music with others. Having an off day? Students a bit tired or distracted? Watch their eyes light up as you start to sing with them in a circle. Or get them going in a rhythm train at the piano. Or get them improvising together. Can a teacher do these things with a student in a private lesson? Yes. Is it more fun and natural in a group of peers? YES.

I still provide individualized instruction. It just takes a lot more work. In fact, I was inspired to compose a lot of short pieces this year that were purposefully scalable: melodies that can be easily played with one finger or all 5 fingers… harmonies that can be played as single notes, 5ths, or triads… leading to students duetting (melody + harmony) or playing hands together in a variety of ways. I have also been teaching pieces that easily work in a variety of articulations and tempi, so that students can learn the ‘same piece’ in many different ways (thank you Forrest Kinney, Paula Dreyer, Marilyn White Lowe). And, of course, students get their very own pieces during their one-on-one time.

Students love to lead. One way I use one-on-one time is to teach a student a piece that they will later ‘teach’ the rest of the group. When the student is ready, they can help me teach the piece by demonstrating the piece and sharing their knowledge with the group. Students love knowing their next leadership opportunity is waiting for them as soon as they polish a piece!

Students rise to the challenge. Students are aware when another student is able to do something they haven't learned to do yet and are often inspired to rise to the unspoken challenges presented by their peers.

Students still progress at the same pace. I don’t spend much, if any, group time on review (unless it’s clear that the entire group needs a review). Students who need it get review and extra support during one-on-one time. Students who are ready for new challenges get new challenges!

I plan to write a lot more over the coming year about my ongoing experiences teaching piano in small groups. Stay tuned and please send me any questions you have about this shift in my teaching!

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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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Barcarole

4/26/2015

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A barcarole is a Venetian boat song, usually in 6/8 meter. Here is a lovely Barcarole by living composer David Duke (b. 1950):
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Star Bright

4/19/2015

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The student composition below was inspired by a piece called Starry Night from 70 Keyboard Adventures of the Little Monster (Volume 2). The dark notes are fixed pitches, the stars indefinite pitches. The student called it, "Star Bright. "
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    Lauren Sonder
    Lauren Sonder is a piano teacher in Norman, OK.
    She believes in providing a well rounded musical education that emphasizes training the ear, learning music in a variety of styles, and being creatively engaged at the piano.

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