We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use.
By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Return to FAQs page

How do I create a practice plan?

Motivating a younger student to practice their musical instrument can be challenging. MusicTeacherNotes helps to alleviate this problem. A tool on MusicTeacherNotes called the Practice Plan Creator helps parents and students turn music assignments into a structured practice plan that even young kids can follow.

Creating a practice plan is a simple three-step process. Once you create your first practice plan, you will see how fast and easy it is to do. You'll also find that it can be used to significantly reduce wasted practice time and frustration that often accompanies getting students to practice music.

Step 1: Select things to practice:

Selecting what a student is supposed to practice is straightforward. Simply turn on or off toggles to add or remove them from the current practice plan.

Step 2: Decide the best way to log practice:

Some skills are better logged by time, while others are better logged by repetitions. Younger children generally do better with repetitions, which is simply knowing how many times they are expected to play a song. For example, you might tell them they need to play Fur Elise three times, rather than play Fur Elise for 10 minutes. When using repetitions, MusicTeacherNotes prompts you to estimate how long each repetition should take. Guesses are fine -- no need to be exact. For example, you might estimate that it takes three minutes to play Fur Elise one time. This estimation is important because, in step 3, you will set how much time the student should practice each skill you've added to their practice plan. MusicTeacherNotes uses your estimate to convert minutes to repetitions automatically.

[SCREEN SHOT]

Step 3: Schedule practice plan times:

Set the days you want the student to practice, then expand the days and enter the amount of time you want to have each skill practiced.

[SCREEN SHOT]

You will notice that if you have a skill set to repetitions, the minute selector goes up in increments based on the amount of time each skill should take to do once. For example, if you estimated that Fur Elise should take three minutes to play one time, then you can assign 3 minutes, 6 minutes, 9 minutes, and so on. You can see how many minutes you've assigned for each skill, and the entire day, in the summary-view as you make changes. You have the option to make any day the "default," meaning it will be copied to all other days that you've scheduled to be practice days.


Join MusicTeacherNotes

It's Free to Join!

Have questions?

Call Us At

1-651-245-3218