The PianoForte Christmas Collection!🎄
Download the Christmas Collection for your students in the PianoForte Printable Membership (only $9.99 / month!)
If we had a penny every time we heard Jingle Bells in the weeks leading up to Christmas - how many pennies would we have?
How many grains of sand on the beach? Or Fish in the Sea? Or stars in the sky?!
Personally, I quite love hearing, playing and teaching Christmas music and it was a total joy to put this collection together!
The music is fun and festive and it also teaches!
I am quite tuned into, and aware of the way PianoForte students think.
I understand exactly what musical elements they need in their repertoire - at each level - AND at each section of each level. This is the reason why this little Christmas Piano Collection is so wonderful for students.
Not only do students understand the music and have fun playing it, the pieces elevate their learning and skill - it isn’t confusing.
I was sooooo….. careful when choosing each piece for this collection because I knew that they all needed to tick VERY SPECIFIC pedagogical boxes. One of the most harmful things in common Beginner repertoire is that it combines too many elements and concepts that aren’t anchored to any real knowledge.
It’s good to stretch a student’s mind, but it’s not good to boggle it.
This is why students LOVE this Christmas collection, and it’s why I love it too!
I chose THREE special pieces for Levels 1,2 and 3.
• We Wish You A Merry Christmas
• We Three Kings
• Jingle Bells (of course!)
Then, I arranged them very carefully in three different ways to correspond to each PianoForte level.
Just like in the PianoForte Level 1 book, The Christmas ‘Level 1’ songs are in Solfa. There is a keyboard diagram to help them place their hands and a teacher duet for accompaniment. There are no complicated rhythms, no strange pitches (no accidentals or diminished intervals that they haven’t been introduced to yet) . You will find the solfa syllables ‘Fa’ and ‘Ti’ - Of course, semitones aren’t introduced until the second half of Level 1,. If a student hasn’t come across them yet I have found that it doesn’t seem to cause confusion. Students understand these quite easily in the context of these songs, and introducing them lays the ground for when they do finally come across those pitches in the method later on.
Same three songs, but on the stave. This is formatted exactly like it is in the Level 2 book. Students learning the songs at this level can use the Level 1 versions as prep, just like it’s presented in the Level 1 method book. So they can play and sing the solfa AND the words!
In PianoForte Level 3, students are introduced to the concept of playing in harmony - or ‘hands together’. It’s the process of playing two notes at once. They learn this as playing in ‘2 voices’ and practice hearing and singing the left hand while playing hands together (getting them ready for Bach Fugues later on!). The Christmas pieces at this level match what they are doing in the Level 3 method book, and the same three pieces are arranged with two hands playing together!
PianoForte Level 4 is wonderful and the Christmas collection at this level is a perfect example of this. In Level 4 students ‘develop skills’. They begin to read with key signatures, they are introduced to compound meter and dotted rhythms. The pieces introduce new technical skills with more complexities and movement around the keyboard. There are pedal requirements and lots more musical details. However! this is all presented carefully in a way that PianoForte students understand. These Christmas pieces are perfectly in line with this. Each piece is FUN and educational. Included in this collection are wonderful arrangements of the follow festive favorites:
Where to Find this Collection . . .
Download this collection for your students in the PianoForte Printable Membership.
The printable membership includes all of this lovely Christmas music and ALSO - all levels of the PianoForte method series, organised as individual pdf downloads. The membership includes all the pieces in the Colour Suites as well as LOTS & LOTS of printable resources to support learning and teaching at every stage of the PianoForte method.
All of this for just $9.99 a month!
Try it out today HERE! (cancel anytime - no pressure!)