With two months to go until the end of the school year, I wanted to give everyone an update on our ongoing 40 hour Piano Maestro practice challenge.The goal of the challenge is to practice in Piano Maestro for a total of 40 hours during the school year, including time in lessons and time at home. (Original post announcing the challenge here) This effectively means students who complete the challenge will have spent 40 hours sight playing music over the course of the school year, and that kind of time goes a long way towards building those real fluency skills that we want piano students to have.
40 hours comes out to 2,400 minutes, so here is our chart tracking how many minutes each student has practiced.
Our top three Piano Maestro practicers so far are:
- Brielle with a 1,330 minutes
- Bronwyn with 1,128 minutes
- Gentri with 889 minutes
And there are a handful of other students in that 800 range as well. There's still a way to go if anyone is to hit that goal of 40 hours, BUT one thing I'm really happy with is that a lot of students are using the app regularly for sight reading practice, whether in lessons or at home, even if it's just a few minutes at a time, because every little bit of sight playing helps build that fluency. I love getting the update from JoyTunes each week and seeing who's been logging in and what music they've enjoyed playing.
Did you know that a home subscription to Piano Maestro is one of the included resources in your studio tuition? If you download the app and use the invite from the studio to set up your home account, you'll have access to all the premium content, including popular music and the full method book library, at no additional cost! If you have any questions about how to get it set up on your iPad, please don't hesitate to ask. As we head into the homestretch of our school year session and this challenge, any students who wanted to do one final push to try and meet that goal - this is your two month heads up!
Happy Practicing! 😁
