Piano Karate

I thought I would share my newest program - Piano Karate - I just put the finishing touches on it!  I created this assessment and incentive program to encourage, motivate and celebrate my piano students, and to help them attain a long-range view of piano lessons and piano. It closely follows my method books of choice - the Faber series of Piano Adventures books and will be so fun for students to do! 

I took the popular Karate Belt color levels and applied them to piano lessons, making this assessment and incentive program incredibly easy for students to understand. Each belt color represents one of the books of the series, from Primer Level through Level 5 and beyond. Each belt color is broken down into 3 stripe levels, giving students both short and long-term goals.  

In his book, The Dynamic Studio, Philip Johnston recommends implementing a Karate-style program to inspire students and celebrate their success.  I took him at his word and spent hours and hours crafting this program to assess, support and reward student progress - all my students will be engaged and have their achievements recognized.

Students will each receive:

• A Piano Karate program book to put in their binders
• Congratulation Cards for each belt color level that they achieve.  We will put these nto a plastic trading card sleeve in their binder.  So fun for the students to look back upon and see how far they have come!
• Piano Karate Membership Cards that will attach to their student bags and to which appropriately colored ribbons will hang from to announce the Piano Karate levels they have achieved.
• A Karate Character to move along a Piano Karate bulletin board according to their level.
• I also created some Student Success Cards to celebrate achievements such as mastering a scale, composing a piece, memorization, practicing, etc. that students can also put into their binders.

Here's what the printed Piano Karate program looks like - these are the Orange Belt tasks (I apologize for the sample pages - I will update these images, soon):

I am really looking forward to this year and to how much fun the students will have with this program!

If you are a piano teacher and looking for a multi-year incentive program that really motivates your students, you can click here.