Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Supplementation of method books?

Hi,
My postings with mitts_off WRT supplementing method books with Suzuki leads me to this question for the group.

How do you all approach supplemental materials for your students using method books, such as Faber, Alfred, Bastien, etc.? Do you consult the Guild, or ABRSM syllabi??

thanks!
BevP

I don't have a "plan" for my supplements. I use whatever I think will benefit them the most. Ie: if they are having trouble with "over-under" I grab one with a lot of that.

The Faber series has several supplemental books like the FunTime/ChordTime/Showtime/Bigtime books, as well as the 'Gold Star' series. There's also popular repertoire, Christmas, etc... When my students are in 2B I like to use the Developing Artist series ( http://www.fjhmusic.com/piano/dapsl.htm ) to introduce simple original classical pieces. I like the idea of NOT waiting until a student is completely out of the method books to give them classical music.

I consult syllabi quite a bit, mostly our state syllabus, but also RCM.

I also have a few favorite anthologies I draw heavily from. The Festival Collection, Essential Keyboard Repertoire, Celebration Series, Christopher Norton Connections, Frances Clark Contemporary Repertoire, and a couple of composer collections - Gillock's Accent on Solos, Jon George's A Day in the Jungle, and the Preludes by Vandall.

Beyond that, I tend to go into classical repertoire and have a number of favorite pieces that I often use, and I'm continually scanning forums, catalogues, and new collections for things to add to my teaching repertoire.

By the way, I always think it's very useful to have a "teaching repertoire." While it's nice to think that we all pick repertoire with only the student in mind, it's very important that the teacher know how to teach it as well.

If I've taught a piece several times in the past, it's much easier for me to teach because I know where students tend to have trouble, and what is required in terms of preparing and presenting the piece to the student. With a new piece, you're always guessing a little bit.

On case in point - I just finished a lesson with a student who's working on the Latour sonatina. According to most syllabi, it's one or two levels beyond her, but since I've taught the piece a lot, I was able to present it in such a way that she was able to have hands together at a steady, moderate tempo in about 2 weeks time. By contrast, we learned a piece last year that was at her level, but it took us about two months to get it performance ready because I'd never taught the piece before.

That's terrific! That is also a very good thing to remember when people want to know why they shouldn't "teach themselves"!

I think that after many years of teaching, we begin to have a feel for what is going to be a problem for students, on first glance, at least on an elementary to intermediate level.

Often an otherwise straight-forward composition will have one or two spots that are not only several times harder than the rest but also so important that when they are not nailed, the whole rest of the piece turns into a train-wreck.

A minor example of that is the famous Liszt Consolation (Db, always forget the number). In general, the way the eigths are beamed fools the eyes of students and makes fairly easy passages look hard and much harder to work out. But the four against three RH embellishments are something I still wrestle with, as a teacher. I just play them. I've had 4 against 3 "in my bones" for almost as long as I can remember.

For me something of this nature is much more of a challenge than Chopin's F Minor Etude (Trois Nouvelles Etudes) because at least in that piece, that problem IS the piece. In the Liszt, the problem is thrown in like a minor after-thought, and it stops most students right in their tracks.