In this article, I want to share some of the sheet music and other resources that we have available for piano teachers with beginner or early students. All of these resources are completely free for you to use during lessons, recitals, or other events your students may be involved in. I hope that these are a help to you and an encouragement to your students to work hard at the piano!
For Sight-Reading Practice
We have a series of sheet music on our site called, Elementary Hymns for Sight-Reading, which were put together by Steve Howard. These are a great way to introduce your students to playing traditional hymns and Christmas hymns while at the same time giving them plenty of sight-reading practice.
These simple songs could also be an encouragement for your students to play if they are already familiar with hearing these songs at church or at home. The lyrics are displayed alongside the notes, so you can suggest that they play for themselves or their family to sing. This will help acclimate them to playing with others early on and hopefully will also help them feel good about their abilities and give them determination to keep learning!
Easy Duets
Something that I always loved as an early student (and continue to enjoy today) was piano duets! I love duets especially for young beginning students since when playing together, the student gets so excited because of the big, fun sound of the music. I have arranged several duets at around the elementary level and made them available for free. Some of the teacher parts are even easy enough that another student or an older sibling can play the secondo part. In several of the duets, the primo part can also be played as a solo. You can find all of these duets of hymns, kids songs, and Christmas music here.
Piano Practice Tips
For some students, it can be quite difficult to get them to practice frequently enough. I personally think that requiring 30 minutes of practice five days a week is a good place to start, even with new students. To help keep track of a student's practice time, you can give them a fun, decorative chart where they can mark down which days they practiced for the amount of time you have set for them. To motivate them to practice enough, at the beginning of a lesson, you can offer them a sticker to put on their chart if they successfully completed five days of practice during the last week. Here are some fun charts that you can download and print to hand out to your students:
Another difficult thing for some students can be making sure they practice correctly. Playing scales at the beginning of every practice time, using the metronome, etc., are things that students don't typically prefer doing (I was one of those students). We offer a free downloadable booklet called 5 Tips for Better Piano Practice which covers these topics and more and explains why these things are important to do. I designed this booklet to be able to be handed out to students and also to be a resource for teachers and pianists to pull ideas from to improve their own practice time. I hope this can be a help to you!
Piano Solo Hymns
If you are interested in finding piano solo hymns that you can assign to your younger students, we have many free elementary and late elementary piano solos you can use. All of the songs we offer in these levels are completely free. I hope that these will be enjoyable for students and useful for church preludes, postludes, or piano recitals. You can find early elementary songs here, elementary songs here, and late elementary songs here.
We also have a full playlist on our YouTube channel that has song previews of all the pieces found at the pages linked above, which can be used to listen through with students if you would like to let them choose a new song to start on. This allows them to hear the finished product and decide if they would enjoy playing the song. Of course, if you have a student who can listen to a song and then not have to work so hard on reading the rhythm or notes in the sheet music, you won't want to let them hear the whole thing first!
Conclusion
I hope that these resources can be helpful to you and your students! If you have questions, comments, feedback, or requests regarding any sheet music or other resources listed in this article, feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you!