How can your student make friends with music?

How can your student make friends with music?

This was a questions posed to me last year by Trevor Dow of Teach Piano Today. The idea is to pair each student up with another student they have never met. Each student fills out a sheet listing some of their favourite things and this sheet is passed on to their ‘Piano Pal’, giving their pal some insight into who they are. Using this knowledge students then compose a song specially for their piano pal.

I thought it sounded fun so I gave it a shot. At first my students were skeptical. For many of them the concept of a pen pal was foreign and the task of composing seemed daunting. Gradually their skepticism changed to excitement and they started asking when they would get to meet their pal!

Our year-end recital seemed too far off so I put together a party (more on that here).

Everyone had a great time. My students no longer felt like they were the only piano student on the planet and the act of writing music, rather than reading it, further reinforced the concepts we were working on each week.

This year I have students asking me when who their pal will be!

So…if your student has lost their copy here is the PianoPalForm they can fill out for their pal. After Christmas we will begin our compositions and maybe, just maybe, there will be a party again 😉