Top 3 Student Benefits for Music Lab

Lesson resources, Tech Tuesdays, Technology, Tips

A few weeks ago, I had a teacher contact me that was brand new in implementing a music lab for her studio. She was writing up a letter for parents explaining the new feature and wanted to include some benefits to get them excited. She was asking for my thoughts and I decided that it would be very beneficial especially those newer to music lab to share here as well!

A little background first… I’ve been doing music lab in my studio for 20 years now. My music lab started out with using one piece of software, Music Ace. I’m sure most of you are familiar with Music Ace as it’s been around for a long time. It’s an oldie but goodie. Matter of fact, I would love to see Harmonic Vision produce an app like Music Ace, wouldn’t you?

Since then my music lab has grown by leaps and bounds. Thousands of dollars have gone in to it because at that time, we just had software to work with. There was no iPad or tablet, apps or anything like that. So when you bought a piece of software, you easily spent a good $50.00 on it. Times that by… well you get the drift. It was not cheap.

Now having a music lab is so much easier and apps are so much cheaper! I go through all the benefits for you to have a music lab in your studio in my free course, The Basics of Starting a Music Lab here. But I wanted to share 3 benefits for students that you can share with your parents.

1) Music lab allows students to review and follow up with the concepts they are learning at their lessons. 

This is one of my favorite reasons because you know how easy it is to run out of time during the lessons. I love that students can review, practice and re-enforce what they are learning with me. Many times it is during the lab time that I know if a student is really “getting” it or not.

2) Music lab creates a well-rounded music learning environment opening up for more time to accomplish goals. 

I’m a big goal-oriented person. Goals are what personally keeps me on task. Likewise, goals can help students stay and accomplish tasks. But also allow them to stretch and grow in their music abilities.

3) Music lab opens up more time for creativity. (Composing, improvising, etc.)

One of my favorite lab activities is having students create compositions and improvise on the keyboard. They love creating stories on the iPad with several different apps such as Toontastic and ToonSpaghetti. Then we can apply the same concept to the Creative Story Compositions. Lab time is more then a time to simply play games on the iPad, it’s a time for exploration and “out of the box” creation!

I’m sure you can think of even more benefits that can be added to my top 3. Matter of fact, please do and share them in the comments! If you are brand new to music lab and plan to implement one in your studio, here is a sample letter of what you can say to parents. Feel free to use all of it or bits and pieces.

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Download sample word document here: Music Lab Letter to Parents

To help keep students engaged and on task during lab time, I created Music Lab Task Cards. I’m really happy with the feedback I’m getting from the Music Lab Task Cards. With excitement, comes questions so I thought I would go ahead and add a Q & A page for the Music Lab Task Cards as the questions are coming in. Please read the post here.

There are 8 editions of task cards in the following subjects:
-Creativity
-Ear Training
-Early Childhood
-Music History
-Note Reading
-Rhythm
-Sight-Reading
-Theory

 

FREE COURSE! New to music lab? Sign up for the free music lab course here. Looking for a more in-depth course to set your music lab up for success? Take the next step and register for Music Lab – Setting Up For Success below.

 

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