Lesson Plan

Piano Puzzle Card

Piano Puzzle Card & Pocket Chart for Preschoolers

, , 0

Ever wonder how to keep child engaged for the entire lesson?

How to give choices and ownership?

Piano Puzzle Card can do all that and more.

Last blog, I explored how to use Piano puzzle as a visual lesson plan tool.  It is great for older students who understand the concept of completing a task and earning the matching puzzle.  As for young students, because they lack the concept of time and tend to just want to finish the puzzle “right now” and make the piano looks pretty.  Asking preschoolers to wait until completing seven or more tasks before they can finally see the finished puzzle can be really challenging.  So….the solution is …… Piano Puzzle Card.

Piano Puzzle Card

Piano Puzzle Card is a friendly version of the piano puzzle for preschoolers.  Each card corresponds to the lesson activities in the puzzle.

What lesson activity does the puzzle card represent?

  1. ABC: Music Theory

  2. 5-line Staff: Sightreading or Tonal pattern

  3. Finger: Technique

  4. Heart: Favorite piece(s) or Improvisation

  5. Star: New piece(s)

  6. Rhythm cards:  Rhythm pattern

  7. ?: Surprise (My students’ favorites!)

  8. MM: Music Making (Making your own music, Improvisation, Composition)

How I Use it:

Show all the Piano Cards on Pocket Chart. I got mine from Lakeshore Learning.  Since it is nearly impossible to cover all the cards in one lesson, I place the extra cards at the bottom of the chart for future lessons.

piano puzzle card on chart

Student completes the task and earns Stars, Apples, or Music Notes to place on the card. My students love to count how many apples they get at the end of the lesson.

Piano Puzzle Card with apple

Piano Puzzle Card helps with Home Practice. I like to use the card image in student’s Home Assignment Sheet.

homesheet single

Get your FREE piano puzzle card

Simultaneous learning theory &  Piano Puzzle Cards

Can students earn multiple cards simultaneously?  Absolutely.   When introducing a new song, we may also chant the rhythm, work on technique, sing solfege or sightread patterns.  In the process of learning the new song, students earn multiple cards (the new song card, the sightreading card, the rhythm card, the technique card).

homesheet multiple

For intermediate to advanced students, the puzzle can be used as a visual tool to show Paul Harris’s famous simultaneous learning theory.

Remember to Get your FREE piano puzzle card and subscribe to the blog

Piano Puzzle Pieces

Piano Puzzle Lesson Plan

, 0

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.

Piano Puzzle Pieces

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?

  1. ABC: Music Theory

  2. 5-line Staff: Sightreading or Tonal pattern

  3. Finger: Technique

  4. Heart: Favorite piece(s) or Improvisation

  5. Star: New piece(s)

  6. Rhythm cards:  Rhythm pattern

  7. ?: Surprise (My students’ favorites!)

How it Works

The student starts the lesson with a complete puzzle like this.

Piano Puzzle Complete

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

  • Color the grand piano picture

  • laminate the picture

  • cut out the puzzle pieces

  • put magnetic strip on the back of each puzzle pieces

  • 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.