The Marble Jar

Over the summer, I decided that my incentive programs were getting a little out of control. I had contest upon contest upon contest, which meant that at the end of every term I was buying rewards for 5-7 students. It really started adding up! I decided to simplify things this fall with a more streamlined incentive. While still fostering competition, this incentive also rewards personal achievements. And with only 2 winners at the end of the term, it saves my wallet as well! :)

Enter the studio marble jar:

A simple concept! At the first lesson, students were given a goal sheet to fill out and place in their binders:

Then each week as they come to lessons, they get to put a marble in the jar for each goal met. If they met their practice goals: 1 marble. If they memorized a song: 1 marble. There are also some more long-range goals on the sheet that we'll be working on for a month or more, but the whole idea behind this contest is that they will see rewards every week (through marbles in the jar) from working hard at home to meet their goals.

At the end of the term I will draw a marble at random from the jar and that person will receive a special prize. The second winner will be the person with the most marbles overall.

So far this week, the marble jar has been a big success! Simple concept- big results! LOVE IT! What are you doing this fall to motivate your students?

The Great Music Race is Over!

The past 10 weeks have completely flown by. Summer is fast coming to a close and schools are starting back up here in Maryland in just one week!

My summer teaching term ended this past week, and I'm looking forward to a 2-week break from teaching before starting the fall term. While summer is always hit-or-miss with regards to consistency with my students, I was really happy to see the majority of my students show discipline and effort with practice over the summer term, as is shown by the distance many of them were able to travel on our studio racetrack. There were a few students who cut out mid-term, but those students who decided to participate in the contest and stuck it out to the end did a pretty good job staying consistent for the 8 weeks they took lessons over the term.

There are also quite a few flags decorating our racetrack, showing the memorization efforts put forth by my students as well. It was a great term, and while I'm looking forward to a break and vacation, my mind is already full of ideas for the fall practice contest!

The Race is On!

After 2 weeks of summer lessons, I thought I'd share a shot of our music racetrack. Unfortunately, the second week of summer was the week that almost half of my studio went on vacation, so a lot of the racecars are still down at the starting line, and the race is still missing a few students, but you can see that there are a few who have entered the race.

I've also had several students who have already shown the initiative to memorize some of their music, which is what the checkered flags in the middle of the racetrack are for.

We're off to a pretty good start, but I'm hoping that this week will see more cars up and in the race!

Summer 2012 Practice Incentive!

This week has sped by! I can't believe it's Sunday evening, and lessons start up TOMORROW! I think I'm all prepared... ;)

One of the things I most look forward to at the start of each new term is a new practice incentive! I have so much fun coming up with a theme and getting everything together. This summer, our theme is "The Great Music Race". Students will be racing their cars around the track to see who can get closest to the finish line by the end of the summer. The racetrack will also get decorated over the term, as each piece memorized will earn a student a flag to put on the track.

Our race track is all completed and ready to go! I'll provide more pictures at the end of the week once students have their cars all set up at the starting line.

I'm also continuing our flashcard study by using Susan Paradis' Notes in the Fast Lane worksheets. I have all 12 levels laminated and I use them with students from time to time, but I thought that this summer would be the perfect opportunity to really make use of those excellent note drills. As an extra incentive, each student who makes it to Level 6 over the 8 weeks of the summer term will earn a ticket to a pizza party at the end of the term!

I'm hoping to see some dedicated practice from my students over these summer months. What are you doing to help motivate your studios over the summer?!

Spring 2012 Practice Incentive 1 Month Update

After 4 weeks of lessons, I took a look at my student's progress. While not every student chose to participate, and some students who chose to participate aren't finding motivation from the practice incentive, many more are taking the contest VERY seriously and putting forth consistent effort from week to week, which absolutely thrills me!

Our first contest rewards weekly practice time- every 100 minutes and they get to add a little pom-pom to their caterpillar. The leader has 4 segments at this point.

The next contest rewards days of practice, as the butterflies move along the garden path for each day they practice. Up at the top of the same picture, several flowers have already taken root in the garden of music as students have memorized their songs- they receive a flower for each song memorized.

Overall, I've been pleased with how quickly my students have jumped on board with this contest, and with how many of them are taking the contest seriously- I've got quite a competitive bunch! ;)

Spring 2012 Practice Incentive: A Garden of Music!

I opted for a springy, garden-type theme for our contest, because even though it's only the early days of January, this teacher is already longing for spring!

Each student will begin with a butterfly and a caterpillar head. Every week their caterpillar will grow longer and longer as they add pom-pom segments for every 100 minutes of practice. On a separate page, the butterflies are on a quest for the flower garden, and every week they'll flutter closer depending on how many days of practice they've accomplished.

However, our flower garden needs a little help getting started! Good thing my students can help with that. ;) For every song they memorize, they get to plant a flower in the garden of music.

Below you'll see a copy of the handout each student will receive for their binders at their first lesson next week. I'm hoping that this will get my studio excited about lessons starting up again!

Fall 2011 Practice Contest Comes to a Close

My fall term came to an end yesterday evening with our annual Christmas party. Students were greeted by the completed wall of fame full of stars!

We celebrated with the sounds of the season as they each played a Christmas song, then we shared a pizza dinner and finished off the evening with a whole bunch of games.

But there's more to the end of the term than just fun and games. At lessons this past week, I reviewed each student's goal sheet (filled out at the beginning of the term) with them, and we discussed together what goals they feel they met, and what they need to focus on over the next term. It was a good way to wrap of the term and get them thinking about the term ahead.

I have make-up lessons this coming week and will also be working on students evaluations as I prepare for the coming term. It's been a really great fall!

Fall Practice Incentive Update

I'm wrapping up my first month of the fall term, and am finally starting to see some of my students earn their first stars for the studio wall of fame. It's been really interesting to see which students are actually the most motivated about keeping the goals they set for themselves, and which students make only half-hearted attempts to keep their goals. There are always some surprises!

At this point, less than half of my studio have earned their first star, but I'm hoping that as time goes on I'll see my students start settling into more of a weekly routine and meeting more of their goals.

For those other teachers who have practice incentives for the fall; how are your students doing? Are they showing the diligence and motivation that you'd hoped they'd show?

Fall 2011 First Week Review and 2 New Printables

It's been a great first week back at my studio. While I have to confess that I was dreading the end of summer and the start of a new schedule a little bit, once the week started up I found myself completely enjoying the change of pace and especially seeing all my students again.

If you missed my post on the fall practice incentive, you might want to take a moment to review that post for a better idea of my focus over the course of the week. As is always the case after a break, the lessons are largely comprised of review and getting students back on track for the upcoming term. It was the perfect time to help them set goals for the fall term!

We spent the beginning portion of the lesson doing just that, and I was very excited about the way my students responded to the challenge. They were all enthusiastic about setting goals for themselves and I can't wait to start up again tomorrow and see how many students really followed through with this.


In addition to weekly practice goals and skills for improvement, I included a special section at the bottom of the page with two additional optional activities; a composition and research project. Several students were excited about one of both of these options, and in preparation for upcoming weeks, I created some brainstorming sheets for my students to use in preparing their compositions and completing their research projects. The sheets are shown below, and they are both available for download on my printables tab under "Other Teaching Aids". I'm sorry the images below are so small...I'm not sure why they came out that way :(

How has everyone else's week gone?

Fall 2011 Practice Incentive: The Wall of Fame!

I'm excited to share this afternoon about the practice incentive I'll be using in my studio this fall: The Wall of Fame! As I planned for the fall term, I wanted to work with my students to help them both set and keep goals for their progress.

At their first lesson, each student will work with me to set goals for their progress over the fall. They'll receive this handout which we'll use to jot down their goals as well as a chart where we'll track their progress.

I'm planning on using a good portion of the beginning of the lesson working with each student to help set up specific goals. The handout has space for them to decide how much they should practice each day, how many days they want to try and practice a week, how many pieces they'd like to memorize, and skills they'd like to improve. In addition to that, there are a few extra projects they can attempt; working on a composition or completing a special research project on a variety of topics.

Each week we'll revisit those goals, and every goal met will move them one step further along their chart. Every 5 spaces will earn them a star on the wall of fame!

I sent this handout out along with my September newsletter detailing the specifics of the incentive.

I'm really hoping that setting concrete goals will help my students make consistent progress through the term, and that meeting those goals will help them feel successful from week to week.

Has anyone else ever attempted a similar practice incentive? How did it go?

Halfway Thru Summer Already!

As summer is definitely my favorite season, I'm sure you can imagine that I write this post with mixed feelings. While the past 5 weeks of our summer term have been an absolute blast, I am still sad to see we're over the hump and moving into the second half.

As we approach the second half of the term, I've been spending some time mulling over some of the highlights thus far of the term. The practice contest is certainly turning out to be a huge success. I think at times there's nothing wrong with fostering a healthy sense of competition in your studio, and we've certainly had our share here this summer! Kids are so excited about coming to lessons each week to add to their ice cream cones and sundaes. While their minds are focused on the rewards, I, as the teacher can see other benefits as they are improving immensely because of the extra time they are putting into practice.

I can be as creative as I want while planning a practice incentive, but the ultimate success really depends on the students themselves. How will they react? Will they be inspired to work harder, or will they just not care? All it really takes is one or two kids who have that drive and it gets the whole studio abuzz.

I'm excited to say that that has definitely happened here! :) So, while I am happy in a successful term thus far, I have to give most of the credit to my amazing students who make it all worthwhile.

Have any inspiring stories to share from your summer term so far? Have your students been motivated? What are you doing to keep them focused and excited about lessons not that we've hit that mid-summer slump?!

When Students Take The Initiative: Summer Lesson Week 2 Update

I haven't done any further posting on my summer practice incentive before now because I've been waiting to see how my students would react this week when they returned to lessons. The first week of lessons for the summer was the introductory week, and this week I got to see how the contest affected their practice. The week's not over yet, but I couldn't wait to share about how things have been going!

Before I go any further into week 2, let me recap week 1. As each student came for their lesson, I showed them the handout about our summer contest. On hand I had pictures of ice cream cones for them to choose and put up on the poster. I found and printed pictures of sugar, cake, and waffle cones online and they chose their favorite kind. In addition to that, I had printed out ice cream scoops in varieties of flavors and showed them some of the options for ice cream scoops they could earn just to get them even more excited.

After the students chose their cone, they got to choose an ice cream sundae. I had about 5 different 'sundaes' for them to choose from. It was fun to see their intense deliberation over which one they wanted! After they'd chosen their sundae and posted that on another sheet I asked them to remind me of just what they needed to do over the week to earn rewards and then wrote it in their notebooks.

So how did my students react? Most were really excited with the summer incentive. I had several students whose eyes lit up as I explained how they could earn scoops of ice cream, and even one or two who asked me, "What if I make it all the way to the top of the page?" (No over-achievers around here... ;) ). Overall, I was very pleased with the positive reaction, but I was curious to see how much of it would stick until the following week.

As the week began, I had the typical reactions.

Some students had taken the contest to heart...

1. Two of my students practiced every single day, and one of them told me, "I knew I wouldn't get much time to practice, but I wanted to make sure I practiced EVERY DAY so I could get sprinkles!"
2. A student who has never before shown the initiative to practice above and beyond what his mom makes him do actually practiced an extra day this week!
3. One of my teenage students came out with, "This ice cream contest was a really good idea!"
4. Several students decided to take the extra initiative to try and memorize pieces, just so that they could get a cherry.

While others were a bit less enthusiastic...

1. The mother of my twin students showed up at the door with profuse apologies because neither of her girls had practiced all week!
2. Another teenage student practiced, but didn't make any attempt to record his practice for rewards.

As you can see, the positives seem to outweigh the negatives at this point (maybe I'm just an optimist though ;) ). But seriously, I can see some definite enthusiasm among my students about this latest practice contest and several of them have already shown that their enthusiasm is more than just a passing fad. Here's hoping that this trend continues and my students show some dedication to practice over the summer months, a time when practice can be spotty at best!

Summer 2011 Practice Incentive Preview!

I'm putting the finishing touches on my practice contest for this summer, and I can't wait to see what kind of reactions I get from my students. Things won't really take shape until the first week of lessons, but just for a sneak preview here's the theme and how my students will be competing over the summer months.

Our summer theme is: ICE CREAM! Not the most original perhaps, but one that is fun and definitely summery. There are two different contests that my students will take part in.

1) Building their own ice cream cone: For every 100 minutes of practice a scoop of ice cream will be added to their cone. The goal is, of course, to have the tallest cone.

2) Make your own ice cream sundae: Each student starts with a sundae of plain vanilla ice cream and will add toppings based on their number of practice days (sprinkles) and for each piece of music they memorize (cherries).

At the end of the summer we'll have a studio-wide ice cream party with games and prizes to celebrate.

What's the point of this contest? I know that some teachers don't believe in tracking practice days and times for fear that this takes away from a focus on quality, but with a studio of primarily elementary/early intermediate students I tend to feel that this emphasis is what they need- an approach and a contest that will reward them for consistent effort and their success at establishing a practice routine in their early years of lessons. I find that this is especially helpful over the summer when the normal school-year routine isn't there to help maintain a more consistent discipline.

As I put the finishing touches on this practice contest, I'd love to hear your feedback. Do you have any ideas for small improvements I could make? Are your students participating in any kind of practice contests over the summer? Please share what you'll be up to with your studio!

Spring Practice Incentive: Results are In!

We finished up the spring practice contest last week and celebrated the end of a great term at the dress rehearsal/studio party. If you want more information on this terms' practice contest, check out this post.

Once again, there were some students who took the challenge to heart, practiced every day, practiced diligently and seriously, and whose playing dramatically improved as a result. Then there were those students who didn't really seem to care about the contest and whose progress over this term was just so-so.

You can see the difference in looking at these charts as of last Friday. The monkeys are all over the tree! But I was happy to see many more on the upper half as opposed to the lower :) The winners received a $10 iTunes gift card.

Here are the results of our memorization challenge. Once again, some students really took this seriously and made it a goal to memorize almost every song they learned, while others really didn't take the challenge to heart.

I haven't awarded the prize yet, as we'll be doing a memory challenge this week in lessons to see how many of these songs the students actually remember, but the winner of this challenge will also receive a $10 iTunes gift card.

Any of you out there wrapping up a practice incentive program? What have you used as a theme? Was it a term or year-long theme? And what great ideas did you have for prizes?

Great Website for Inexpensive Game Pieces...and Lots More!

While searching around for some studio game accessories, I came across this great website. Not only are there some neat game pieces available like dice, play money, pawns, chips, sand times, and spinner sets (all at very inexpensive prices), check out the beads and findings section! There is also a page with charms, decorative brads, and under the 'ephemera' page you'll find a kitchen sink pack, tickets, paper bits, and an alphamania pack....have I sold you on this website yet!? There are so many great items for games, studio prizes, teacher projects, etc...I am super excited about taking advantage of several of these great deals for my own studio. Happy shopping! :)

Additional Studio Foci for the Spring

Yesterday I shared about my spring practice incentive. That's an activity that's always fun to plan, and even more enjoyable as I see my students get caught up in the spirit of the competition.

In addition to the spring practice incentive, however, I have a few other drills I'm incorporating into weekly lessons.

1) To help my students develop a better sense of familiarity with the keyboard and basic intervallic recognition, I'm using the Across the C's sightreading sheets from Natalie Wickham's Music Matters Blog. I love how these worksheets drill spatial and intervalic concepts. The series is also great for drilling additional concepts like: looking for repeated patterns, reading ahead and preparing the next hand position, and maintaining a steady pulse. These sheets are easily accessible, which allows the student to feel a sense of accomplishment.

2) For students who need a bit more work on note recognition, I'm assigning Notes in the Fast Lane sheets from Susan Paradis' website. I've been amazed at how much my students (especially the guys!) love this activity.

3) Another concept I'm really emphasizing for my intermediate students this spring is pulse. This means (oh no!) metronome work. I'm not one to assign a huge amount of metronome practice for my students, but for those who seem to struggle with feeling and maintaining pulse, I've made a resolution with myself that I will start incorporating more metronome work into their weekly assignments.

I'm sure that as the weeks progress I'll start pulling out additional drills to address new issues that crop up, but these were ideas I decided to incorporate right from the start, and I'm hoping to be able to give a positive report in the weeks to come on the success of each drill!

Studio Practice Incentive: Spring 2011

This past week was the first week of lessons for my spring term. I had a lot of fun coming up with an idea for this term's practice incentive, although, to give credit where credit is due, it was really my husband who inspired the idea behind the contest.

Once Christmas is past, my brain jumps ahead about 6 months and starts wishing for warmer, summer-type weather, so to keep with this theme, my spring practice incentive is tropically centered.

My students are participating in two different contests this spring. At their first lesson, I handed out a page for their activity binder with information about the two contests.

Practice Incentive #1: Just Mon-key-ing Around
This contest involves each students' weekly practice. I created a palm tree and the students' monkeys climb the palm tree as they add up practice minutes and days. I have always struggled as a teacher with whether it's better to emphasize how much students practice or how well students practice, and while I still haven't come to any definite conclusions, I felt that the contests that emphasize collecting practice minutes generally result in greater diligence on the part of my students. You can see in this picture the palm tree I created with all the monkeys piled up at the bottom waiting to begin their ascent.



Practice Incentive #2: I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts
I try to encourage memorization with my students whenever possible, but there are some students who just struggle with committing music to memory. I decided to make memorizing a goal for my studio this spring and created a contest to help inspire my students. Each student has a palm tree and they collect one coconut on their tree for each piece they memorize. I hope to encourage my students to take the idea of learning a piece by memory to heart and help them develop good memorizing habits and skills. You may not be able to see from this picture, but a few of my students already have coconuts on their palm trees!



It may still be winter here in Maryland, and cold to boot, but I'm dreaming of the tropics and I hope to see my students excel this term with these two contests!

First Week of the New Term: A Review

Take a deep breath or a sigh of relief, and let it all out. Yes, I have made it through the first week of lessons this term. I typically find that the first week of the term is even harder for me than the last. I've spent hours upon hours prepping and planning, and then it's time to put it all to the test! I spend a good portion of each lesson introducing the term practice incentive, handing out additional worksheets, and orienting my students toward the term goals.

After a brief break, it always takes me a week or two to get back into the swing of the weekly lesson routine. And it seems that it usually takes the students a week or two to get back into a regular practice routine as well. It's always amazing to me just how detrimental even one week off can be to a student whose practice habits and progress have been shaky over the previous term.

I also find myself expending about twice as much teaching energy the first week back. Why? Because I'm trying to start the term out on a positive, enthusiastic note. I go all out trying to spread a contagious enthusiasm to my whole studio, and the end of the week usually leaves me feeling pretty exhausted!

I do want to share a bit more about this term's practice incentive (which I think has been a HUGE hit with my students this week) and several of the other ideas I'm using in my studio this spring, but that's a project for another day. Tonight I just want to sit back and reflect on the week.

It's been a good week, with it's ups and downs. Some students disappointed me with their lack of practice and discipline over break, and I could tell they hadn't touched their music or even thought about piano once. But others surprised me completely! I had several students show up for lessons who had worked above and beyond what I had required at the last lesson. Some students surprised me with memorized pieces.

Through the week I found myself freshly inspired for the coming term with ideas and concepts on how to motivate my students. So, while it wasn't an exceptional week, I find myself satisfied with my personal accomplishments as well as those of my students. Here's to a successful Spring 2011 Term at Discoveries Piano Studio!