Sharing Time

"Me? Teach piano? Well, yeah sure...I guess I could do that."

That was basically my thoughts when a sister in my branch asked me if I would start teaching her kids piano. Soon after that I had my first five piano students without even advertising. The week of my first lesson I had a little panic attack that went something like this, "What am I doing?! I don't even know what to teach them first! Do I teach them how to read music in the first lesson? What piano books am I going to have them get? Etc." Luckily, I have a sister-in-law that has taught piano for quite sometime and she basically walked me through how to teach the first lesson. Whew. After the first lesson, I started developing my own teaching style and now it feels like I've been teaching piano for years.

Sometimes it's hard to get my students to want to practice the piano everyday. I try different teaching techniques all the time, but I've found the most helpful things is letting my students pick the songs they want to play...songs that aren't even in their piano books. All of them love learning Primary songs and Hymns because they are already so familiar with them. The only problem is they are WAY too difficult for them to learn so early on. So what do I do? I create my own simplified versions. I thought this would be a good place to share them after I've written them to hopefully help other piano teachers and students.

The first simplified song I'll share is "Book of Mormon Stories"...what kid doesn't love that song? Enjoy!