2026-2027 Events

October 17-18, 2026 — Group Classes
December 5-6, 2026 — Group Classes
January 24, 2027 — Performance Class & Guest Artist Workshop
February 27-28, 2027 — Group Classes
April 10-11, 2027 — Group Classes
May 22, 2027 — Student Final Recital

How to Practice

Use the Practice Tools panel below. It logs your practice for you — no comments needed.

Press Start here. It picks up where you stopped last time.
Read the assignment, press Start, practice.
Tap the kind of practice — learning, spotting, memorizing, polishing, run-through or review — then press Done.
Press Next practice item and go again.

Capped items count down and chime. Keep going if it's going well.

Got something to say about an assignment? Paste the line it gives you into the comments and add your note.

Also in the panel: a metronome, a spotting counter, and recording.

Log only what you actually did, on the day you did it. Five minutes is a real entry. Logging starts October 1.

🟩 on track · 🟨 needs extra attention · 🟪 didn't get to it at the lesson · 🟥 priority · ⬛️ don't practice this one

[PRACTICE TOOLS]

This week is about finding out where you are. There's almost no playing on this list on purpose — it's note reading, rhythm, and theory, which are the things that will make everything else faster later. Don't worry about anything on this list being perfect.

One thing to get: a metronome. Either a physical one or a free app on your phone or computer. You'll need it for two of these assignments.

Start Here

1. 🟥 Watch the practice logging video

Watch it once more on your own, and then watch it with your mom so she knows how it works too.
This is the first assignment because everything else on this page gets logged in the comments below.

🎥 How to log your practice https://youtu.be/OzsKXkZTb0U

💬 Log it: Practice logging video — type of practice — minutes.

Theory

2. 🟩 Celebrate Theory, Preparatory Level — Units 1, 2, and 3

⏱ Start the stopwatch.

Print the units out.
Unit 1, Getting Started. Answer all of it. Some will be review for you.
Unit 2, the treble staff. On page 20, skip the make-up-a-phrase part — that's the acronym method, and we're not using it.
Unit 3, the bass staff.
Read the instructions. Theory is only tricky when you skip the instructions.

There's a quiz next lesson on Unit 1

Be ready to teach me about anything in bold.
The best way to prepare is to practice teaching it to your mom or dad. If you can teach it, you'll pass.

💬 Log it: Theory — type of practice — minutes.

3. 🟩 Keyboard spelling challenge, page 14

⏱ Start the stopwatch.

Print page 14 out three times and do it three times.
See how fast you can get through it. Some of it is cheesy — do it anyway, it's the fastest way to fix the note reading.

💬 Log it: Keyboard spelling — type of practice — minutes.

Musicianship

4. 🟩 Basic Rhythmic Training, Nos. 48-52

⏱ About 5 minutes per practice session. Start the stopwatch.

Prepare all five as if you were going to perform them.
Do all five every time you practice. If one becomes easy, that's great — don't stop practicing it.
Always clap one measure of silence before you start. That's your moment to get ready and think about what you're doing. It applies to every assignment we do.
Clap on the final bar line too — the thick one at the very end.
Clap the lower-stem notes like a metronome and "ta" the top line.
Read the information at the top of page 26, and the pages before it if you need them.

If you make a mistake, don't stop

The skill to build is not pausing. Let the mistake go and keep moving to what's ahead of you.
Eventually you cover mistakes so well that people don't notice. That's a performance skill, not sneakiness, and it's what group classes and performance classes are for.
You already did this well at the lesson — you kept going, and that was the best part.

💬 Log it: Basic Rhythmic Training — type of practice — minutes.

5. 🟩 Landmark note flashcards — green band

⏱ Start the stopwatch.

Goal: say them all correctly to a steady beat at m.m. 50 per card. That's what the metronome is for.
If you don't know a card, let it go and move to the next one. Put it in a second pile.
Keep going until everything ends up in one pile.
It helps to have a partner, but you can also just lay them down on the table to the beat.
Only letter names come out of your mouth — no "oh sorry," no "I mean." Same skill as not stopping in the rhythm book.
Quiz on these next lesson. If 50 gets easy, add more cards rather than going faster.

💬 Log it: Flashcards — type of practice — minutes.

6. 🟩 Musical alphabet, forward and backward

⏱ Start the stopwatch.

Say the letter names forward and backward, starting from any letter, to a steady beat.
From F, for example: F G A B C D E F, then F E D C B A G F.
Then do it from A, from B, from every letter. Challenge yourself to go faster.
Why: when you see a note on the page, this is what lets you go up or down from it instantly instead of counting.

💬 Log it: Musical alphabet — type of practice — minutes.

7. 🟩 Beginning Exercises in Solfège

⏱ Start the stopwatch.

Pages 10, 11, 12 — exercises 1 through 6. Be able to pass them off at m.m. 84.
Pages 15 through 22 — numbers 1 through 18. Also at m.m. 84.
Bonus, if you have time: pages 23 through 29, exercises 1 through 17, also at m.m. 84.
Say the letter names out loud, the same way you do the flashcards.
This book isolates the landmark notes — the early exercises are only C and G — so it's the flashcard drill written out for you.

💬 Log it: Solfège reading — type of practice — minutes.

Technique

Nothing yet. We'll start this once the note reading is moving.

Repertoire

Nothing yet, on purpose. We're building the reading first.

How to Read by Landmark

You learned note names with acronyms — Every Good Boy Does Fine, FACE, All Cows Eat Grass. Those work, but they slow you down permanently, because every time you read a note you have to run the whole phrase and then find the letter. So we're replacing them with landmarks.

A landmark is a place you already know that tells you where you are. The Statue of Liberty. The Great Wall. The cross street you recognize on your own block. On the staff, landmarks work the same way: you memorize a few fixed points, then read everything else by its distance from them.

The landmarks we're starting with

Bass clef F — line 4. The bass clef is the F clef, and the two dots sit around that line. "Clef" comes from the French clé, meaning key, as in a key that unlocks the names of the notes.
Treble clef G — line 2. The treble clef is the G clef, and it curls around that line.
Middle C, treble C (space 3, an octave above middle C), and bass C (space 2). Two ledger lines above the treble staff is also a C, and two below the bass staff is a C — the two clefs mirror each other, which makes them easier to remember.

Ledger lines are the extra short lines added above and below the staff. They work in both directions. This is a term I want you to know by name.

Once the landmarks are automatic, you add the note directly above and directly below each one. That's how the flashcard assignment is built — landmarks first, then their neighbors, then outward.

A note that is touching the staff from outside, like D below the treble staff, is still below the staff. Touching is not the same as being on it.