How do I create a practice plan?

Motivating younger students to practice their musical instrument can be challenging. MusicTeacherNotes helps solve this problem with a tool called the Practice Plan Creator, which turns 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 plan, you’ll see how quick and easy it is—and how much it reduces wasted practice time and frustration that often comes with getting kids to practice music.

Step 1: Select Skills or Songs to Practice

Choosing what a student should practice is straightforward. Simply toggle skills or songs on or off to include them in the current practice plan.

Step 2: Decide How to Log Practice

Some assignments are best tracked by time, while others work better with repetitions. Younger children often respond better to repetitions (e.g., “play this song three times”) rather than minutes. When using repetitions, MusicTeacherNotes prompts you to estimate how long one repetition will take. This estimate helps convert minutes into repetitions automatically in the next step. For example, if playing a song once takes about four minutes, you can set the system to calculate practice time in four-minute increments.

Step 3: Schedule Practice Plan Days

Choose the days you want the student to practice, then expand each day to enter the amount of time or number of repetitions for every skill. If a skill is set to repetitions, the time selector increases based on your earlier estimate. For example, if one repetition of Für Elise takes three minutes, you’ll see increments of 4, 8, 12 minutes, and so on. The summary view shows the total time assigned per skill and for the entire day.

You can also set any day as the “default,” and the plan will copy that schedule to all other selected practice days, saving time in setup.

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