Practice Schedule for Grade 2 Piano

[MomFromSE]

Hi all, my DD is studying for her Grade 2 piano and as she's quite young I create her practice schedule but am trying to keep it to 25-30 minutes max a day. I was wondering what most do.

At the moment, she practices

1. half or the scales each day plus doing half of the grade 1 scales so she doesn't forget them and does the broken chords as well for the new scales. This takes about 5 minutes
2. She plays each of her pieces right hand / left hand and hands together once all the way through though she might spend a little time working on a tricky bit
3. She plays her 3 exercises rh / lh and then hands together
4. She does 5 minutes of sight reading practice

She does aural practice at school once a week via a club and she's naturally very good at it so I don't bother at home.

That's a lot ... mine did G8 on half an hour a day ... but if she's happy with it ... I always did one scale a day, one piece of sight reading and one piece, or part of a piece. And have a timetable so remember what you've done. How old is she?

She is happy with it-- in fact we have to put a timer on it so we have a fixed stop time as otherwise she would use up the entire morning playing. I'm glad your DD got to great 8 in only 30 minutes a day. Her piano school seem to assume kids should be practicing a lot though.

With the practice schedule you have, how often did you practice? So if only 1 piece a day, how many times a week were you playing each piece?

@Moominmammacat sorry, I forgot to tag you in the reply

Pretty much every day ... little and often!

I think you are doing plenty.
From just your title, I was going to ssay 15 mins, 5 or 6 times a week (ie most days, but occasionally gets forgotten!).

As she gets more familiar with the pieces, she might not need to practice the hands separately each time.

When is the exam? I’m assuming Trinity as exercises?

How secure are the pieces, with the amount of practice she is is doing I would expect them to be quite secure by now, does she still need to be doing hands separately each time? She should be concentrating on how musically she can play them, dynamic variations, phrasing etc. not just ‘playing it through’ making sure the notes are right. Trinity has very objective marking, 8 marks per piece are allocated to musicality.

practicing sight reading is important, but so is enjoying the piano, how about mixing it up a bit and getting her a book of contemporary music she might enjoy, still do a couple of sight reading exercises every day but add something fun too. Some of my students are enjoying this book. ABRSM Pop Performer! Piano - Initial-Grade 3 amzn.eu/d/foKFEO8

I’m a piano teacher. I would say it’s less about how long each day and more about the quality of the practice.

Maybe pick a few different scales each day and do them a few times.

I would say that playing each piece once is a bit pointless. The point of practice is repetition, it needs to be played over and over to improve. Your daughter could do a different piece each day, but play it four or five times, concentrating on any difficult bits and spending more time going over them.

@Billybagpuss Thanks that's really interesting. She's only just started her pieces last month and also plays other bits for fun before adding a new exam piece so its still relatively early days. Her teacher suggests hands separately as standard to develop technique even once you can play hands together reasonably well so its interesting to hear not everyone thinks that's necessary.

@Occitane I'm trying to keep her practices as short as possible actually which is why I'm asking how everyone else squeezes it all in. I suppose all learners are different but playing each piece once but everyday seems to work for her. She's quite young so too much repetition can get boring when she's still mastering a piece, though she does correct mistakes as part of it. Once she's mastered a piece though she plays it non-stop just for fun all day.

Sleep helps consolidate learning so playing it 6 times a day but only once a week is meant to be less effective than once a day for 6 days a week. She did her grade 1 in just a few months that way and did very well so it seems to work for her.

It does sound though that most people don't practice all the pieces and exercises everyday which is enlightening! We already split scales across the days so I might do the same for the exercises so we can shorten her practice times to 20 minutes and the idea of her sight reading being pop songs is great as traditional sight reading exercises are a bit dull @Billybagpuss

Does everyone do sight reading every practice session or just a few times a week?

Great that your daughter is so keen on practice. How old is she? When mine were in primary I found before school practice much more effective than after school.

For sight-reading, I am a big fan of the Paul Harris sight-reading books. Little bit every day.

The point you made about practising one piece 6 times in a once a week session or once a day for 6 days….that’s a bit ‘all or nothing’, there is something in between those two. Playing through each piece once a day only is not going to allow much opportunity to develop phrasing, dynamics, articulation, what makes the piece musical. Grade 2 pieces are still very short - make the most of that now before they become longer and trickier to fit in. Your daughter doesn’t even need to play the piece all the way through - but focussed practice on trickier bars. Re separate hand practice, once the piece is familiar enough, I would only be doing separate hand practice for short sections where needs be - not just playing the whole thing. I would play 2 pieces on a rotation each day, so pieces A&B on day 1, B&C on day 2, etc.

@Circleoffifths we practice in the morning before school-- its why we need to cap the length of time. She's 6 so quite young.

My point above was that the same volume of practice spread out across more sleeps cycles leads to faster improvement and learning, which isn't just true for piano but for everything including sport, academics etc.

Also she does work on phrasing, dynamics etc. You don't need to do something repeatedly in each session to practice it. So her teacher will give her notes each week like-- please work on contrasting the dynamics between x and y. That week before she starts practicing the piece that day, I'll remind her to focus on whatever the teaching notes are.

@Circleoffifths I meant to thank you for the recommendation. She does the Paul Harris books now. Just one short exercise a day.

Sounds like she is very motivated! We do scales tubs for exams. Write out the names of all the scales on bits of paper, put in a tub. Take out 2 or 3 each day. If it's good it goes in the second tub, if it needs work, back in the first tub. Next day, take 2/3 from first tub again, good ones go in second tub. After a few days, you should have transferred them all to the good tub, so start again. Once they are all mastered, just draw some randomly each day.

I suggest this to my students too. It solves the problem of G major being absolutely perfect but they never get any further down the list.

Half scales every day is a lot - we tended to do about the number of scales that would be asked in the exam, using a two tubs approach like PPs describe.

And yes a SR exercise or two every day.
For mine that would be too much mechanical playing through and not enough working on pieces. Playing through whole pieces hands sep is the sort of thing my son tries to do and call it practice when he's being lazy and not engaging his brain with thinking about what actually needs doing. For him it doesn't seem to do any good. Playing a long bit hands sep once isn't helping him learn patterns, it's just demonstrating that he can read music, which we already knew. He needs a more intense burst to actually learn a pattern, or correct it if it's gone wrong, same short section several times over separately then together. And then once he's learned it repeatedly playing that section hands sep doesn't really add anything and time is better focussed elsewhere.

And again when working on style, they want to try the same small bit several times to experiment with different degrees and ways of doing it. How loud can you do it before it starts sounding lumpy? How short a staccato sounds good or does it start sounding too spiky? How exactly to slow down the ending? How to pace that crescendo? You want to try several different ways and see what you like.

But reading between the lines I'm suspecting your daughter is finding this level quite easy still? It may be you find she needs more focussed practice as she progresses to more challenging levels for her.

@thirdfiddle she’s finding it harder than grade 1 but not very challenging though I can’t really compare to other kids.

Her teacher seems to think you can shape the music better listening to the parts separately. So sometimes at first she’ll have her play the left hand and sing the right hand for instance at first so perhaps she’s a little unorthodox! They do improv as well in her lessons so it’s not just about learning to play the songs as quickly as possible.

I’m surprised though by how uncommon playing separately is..:

It sounds like 2-3 scales a day is more common that the 4 a day we are doing - though only arpeggios for 2 scales plus the contrary motion exercise. I think we can try that as she finds most of the scales very easy so it’s a bit of a waste of time to do them all so frequently though it’s also nice in some ways as only doing things that are a slog can be a bit demoralising!

Playing and singing, I like that idea! It's not that we don't use hands separately as a tool I think, but we use it in a targeted way for a particular section. So e.g. if they're working on the flow of the melody in the first section they might do that a few times melody part only, then play the accompaniment to practice keeping it gentle, then combine. If you only play through the whole thing once hands sep in a session, there isn't the same opportunity to experiment and compare. You don't want to play through the whole piece several times and even if you did you're not hearing the different ways of doing it next to each other to decide what's best.

@thirdfiddle that's interesting. She does play sections again sometimes and experiments with how to play sections including transposing the key or playing it an octave higher for fun. I tried this morning to see if she'd like to play the pieces more times and do less but I think she likes the variety of doing different things. Its probably her age. If we had unlimited time in the morning she'd voluntarily practice for much longer. When she plays notes combinations for the first time she likes to listen to them and experiment with them etc. and she does play her pieces for fun outside of formal practice time, particularly once she's quite good at them which I guess helps too near the end.

Your DD sounds very musical :) I expect she'll naturally move towards practicing smaller sections as the pieces get longer and more complicated. Good luck with the g2!