In this day and age kids are so incredibly busy with their school homework that they don’t even get enough rest, a good night of sleep because they were sitting up so late finishing up school homework. This however, is a good problem because usually it’s the kids who want to get more out of their schooling and therefore, get into honors or AP classes, which are more demanding and require more homework time than regular classes.
Adding in piano lessons, and daily piano practice routine can be challenging to balance in these kids’ lives. The good news is that just like any other problem that has a solution, this can also be solved, and get amazing results. First of all, usually, piano lessons are taken once a week. Between the finished lesson with a teacher and meeting for the next lesson, there is 6 days ahead of the student. If the piano student spends at least 2 times of focused 10 min. practice in his/her daily routine, by the 6th day there should be great results. The expectations should be small, for example, trying to just improve on one page out of five page long piano piece. If the student cannot even devote this type of daily piano practice, then the strategy should be changed to just practicing the piano for every other day for 20 min. That’s total of 3 day practice.
The ultimate goal in practicing the piano is the consistency. It is very important to enforce little but daily piano practice than longer practice with too many days that pass in between. This 10 min. practice can also be done between doing homework, or the first thing that the student does when getting home after school. If after all, these 2 strategies fail, then taking 30 min. piano lessons twice a week should help student improve tremendously. One of the practice will be to learn new theory concepts, or going over the details in a new piece, etc., and the other practice should just be playing and practicing these pieces.