Everyone knows that the key to learning the piano is consistent daily practice time. How successful a student will be; however, is just as dependent on what and how they practice during that time. But piano students don’t start lessons magically knowing how to organize their time. That’s where a practice chart comes in. A chart helps keep the practicer on task and helps them to use their time efficiently. In fact, these charts don’t have to be limited to pianists, they can be a valuable support tool for all sorts of music lessons, regardless of which musical instrument one plays!
Beginner Practice Chart
This chart is designed for pianists who are just starting out.
Technique
I encourage beginners to warm up by taking some time to focus on a technical exercise. The point of this chart is to encourage mindfulness while practicing, so they should also identify which technique they are working on.
Beginner technique work is typically focused on maintaining strong rounded fingers and using arm weight to create a rich tone.
Repertoire
After warming up, comes the bulk of the work: repertoire. Beginners tend to go through many pieces quickly, so this chart includes 6 spots for new pieces. It is common for beginners to practice by just running through their pieces, but they will learn more and develop better practice habits if they keep a specific element of music in mind when they play. This practice chart encourages a student to go through each new piece 3 times, focusing on a different aspect of the music each time. At this
Notes
When learning the notes, students can practice their note names by saying each one aloud as they play, or focus on their directional reading by stating whether they are stepping or skipping, up or down, from note to note.
Rhythms
When first learning rhythm notes, students can count the length of each individual note. Quarter notes are 1, half notes are 1-2, etc. Once measures have been introduced, It is better to count by measures, starting on beat 1 at the start of each new measure.
Dynamics
Dynamics are how loud you play. This is fairly straightforward, but it is easy to ignore dynamic markings when playing. That’s why they should go through the piece one time a day, taking special care to follow dynamic markings.
Polish and Memorize
The final section provides space for pieces that students are repeating for another week, so that they can polish them off and memorize them. Maintaining a list of memorized pieces allows the student to always have something ready to pull out of their sleeve when they want to perform!
Why do young kids need a practice chart?
It is really common for younger students to forget what they practiced at the end of the week. Oftentimes, they did practice, but by the end of a busy week they just don’t remember what they did each day. Before I started using practice charts, I would ask students how much or what they practiced and the most common answer was, “I don’t know.” This is not much information for the teacher to work with! Resourceful music teachers can often tell a lot about how much a young musician has practiced just by listening to them play, but a more detailed practice log will help for diagnosing issues. Practice sheets help teachers know if a struggling music student has shirked their practicing or has tried their best and just needs a little bit more help.
It’s also important to remember that young children need to regularly experience a feeling of accomplishment. Check boxes are a fun way to track their progress. It helps parents too, because after their child practices, instead of trying to figure out if they were playing the “right things”, they can just check if they filled out their sheet.
Late Beginner/Intermediate Practice Chart
Pianists can use this chart as soon as they have started to learn about articulation. The timing will vary for different people, but as a ball part articulation is often introduced at the beginning of the second year of study.
Technique
Technique will work much the same for intermediate students as it does for beginners. Intermediate pianists will still be working on their finger strength and arm weight, but will start to add some more wrist motion to the mix.
Sight Reading
As a pianist progresses, learning new pieces becomes less like sight reading, so it is good to start including intentional sight-reading selections as part of their warm-up.
Sight-reading is when you play a piece without having practiced and try to correctly play as many details as possible while keeping a steady tempo. If you make a mistake, keep going without losing track of your beat! This skill is especially important for pianists, who will go on to have opportunities to accompany other musicians or play in groups where they will often need to play something they haven’t previously practiced and without stopping to fix errors.
Sight-reading selections should be easier than the music the student is learning on their repertoire list. Remember the goal is to not need a whole week to learn this!
Ideally, there will be something new to sight-read each day. This can be done by breaking a piece up into smaller sections for each day, or doing a sequence of selections from a sightreading book or another book one or two levels below the student’s typical repertoire.
Repertoire
As a student advances, they also have more to think about than just notes, rhythms, and dynamics. Articulations are added to the mix. There are a variety of articulations that can be included in a score, but for beginner and intermediate pianists, they are typically limited to non-legato, legato, and staccato.
Adding this 4th category to the list prompts the pianist to play each piece more times when they practice, which is appropriate because the pieces are getting harder and take more effort to learn!
Polish and Memorize
This section becomes more important as a pianist progresses. In the late beginner/early intermediate stages students will still have some pieces that they finish in one week, but it will become more common to need another week to polish a piece and memorizing will take a little more effort as the pieces get longer, too.
Why do older kids need a practice chart?
Intermediate students who have never used a music practice chart inevitably hit a wall where the difficulty of their music surpasses their sight reading ability and they suddenly have to learn how to practice effectively to continue making progress. This is a make-it or break-it time for piano lessons where the student might quit in frustration. Using a practice chart eliminates that wall and keeps students on an upward trajectory.
Advanced Practice Chart
As pianists advance, they need more ability to customize what they are practicing on each day. The options for focused practice are too many to predict!
Scales, Chords, and Arpeggios
Advanced pianists should be using scales, chords, and arpeggios to warm up and work on their technique. Scales, chords, and arpeggios offer a lot of opportunity to work on finger, wrist, and arm technique. They are also found in various forms in most music, so this work will not only improve technique, but also make things easier on the pianist when they are learning their repertoire.
Sight-reading
Out of all pianists, sight-reading is the most important for the advanced. This is because advanced pianists work on so much less repertoire than their beginner and intermediate counterparts. While a beginner or intermediate student may learn 4 new pieces a week, an advanced student is more likely to learn 4 pieces over a span of several months. Sight-reading is a great way to keep their reading skills honed while they are focusing on such challenging long-term repertoire projects.
Etudes
An etude is a study piece. This category of music forms a bridge between exercises and repertoire. They are more interesting to play than exercises, but unlike typical repertoire pieces, etudes focuses on exploring a single technical issue. They are more fun to play than exercises, and easier etudes are sometimes used as flashy encore pieces after a standing ovation. At the highest level, concert etudes are extremely technically challenging pieces intended for performance.
Repertoire
The repertoire section here functions more as a practice journal. Each day, the pianist should pick something specific to work on. This can be learning the notes to a certain phrase, checking in on dynamics, shaping, phrasing, working out a technical issue, speeding up a section, etc. The options are too varied for the practice sheet to plan ahead for you. Mark down the section and your goal for the day, then after you practice jot down any comments you want to remember the next time you return to the piano. Options for this include reminders to keep working on an issue or section, or the metronome marking you left off on if you are working on bringing a piece up to tempo.
You might set your goals at the beginning of each practice session, or your teacher might help you pick 5 things to focus on for the week.
At this point, pianists are developing their own style and discovering their favorite ways to practice. The advanced practice chart is meant to offer you a starting point that you can take and make your own to suit your needs.
Why do advanced pianists need a practice sheet?
Most students in high school fall into the advanced pianist category. Learning advanced repertoire is hard work and highschoolers aren’t known for having much time to practice.
These older students will find that their practice is much more efficient when they incorporate specific goals into their piano practice routine.
A piano practice chart encourages you to break a challenging piece down into daily short term goals, which will get you to your long term goal (learning the piece!) faster and easier.
Why do teachers like practice charts?
Piano teachers traditionally write out an assignment sheet complete with pieces assigned and specific things to work on to prepare for the next lesson. A practice chart saves time during the lesson and allows the teacher to set more detailed daily practice goals without taking time away from the student. A chart also serves as a framework for creating the weekly lesson plan, and makes it easy to see at a glance what a student practiced on any particular day over the last week.
Please enjoy these free printables, and if this is your first time using a practice chart let me know what you think in the comments!
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