Piano Puzzle Lesson Plan
It’s a piano puzzle.
It’s a lesson plan tool for teacher.
It’s a lesson road map for student.
It’s a visual aid for student to make choices of lesson activities.
It can also be transformed into a homework assignment sheet.
Children are endless wonder to me – the amazing amount of information they are able to absorb and process (when they choose to focus), their need of wanting to be in control, their short attention span and their little sense of time. How do I take advantage of these traits as a teacher to optimize lesson time and help my students learn the best?
Children needs visual clues, structures, choices and something tangible to touch. The Piano Puzzle Visual Lesson Plan gives them just that. The lessons are presented in a fun and engaging way with the Piano Puzzle. The puzzle works great for 7 year old students and up. For beginner students, each puzzle piece represents a lesson activity.
What lesson activity does the puzzle piece represent?
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ABC: Music Theory
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5-line Staff: Sightreading or Tonal pattern
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Finger: Technique
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Heart: Favorite piece(s) or Improvisation
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Star: New piece(s)
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Rhythm cards: Rhythm pattern
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?: Surprise (My students’ favorites!)
How it Works
The student starts the lesson with a complete puzzle like this.
Student takes the puzzle pieces and places them on the side while naming each activities. Remind student that our goal is to make the grand piano look great by participating in each activity. Give student choices to decide which activity to start. After completing each activity, student gets to put the corresponding puzzle piece in .
Who is Piano Puzzle for?
It works great for older beginner students. Younger students just want to put all the puzzle pieces in at once. Young children do not have the sense of time and future yet and all they want to do is to complete the puzzle right now.
I have designed another visual lesson plan for the younger students. Stay tuned and it will be covered in the next post.
I will also discuss how you can use the puzzle for intermediate to advanced students and how to adapt it to the simultaneous learning theory by Paul Harris in a later post.
How I made the Puzzle
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Color the grand piano picture
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laminate the picture
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cut out the puzzle pieces
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put magnetic strip on the back of each puzzle pieces
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place the puzzle and pieces on the magnetic board
I found the grand piano coloring page on pinterest.
These are just some of the basic activities and the symbols on the puzzle pieces can be easily modified to suit your needs. Look forward to hearing how you implement this with your students.
