When Alfred Music invited me earlier this year to write a collection of space-inspired piano pieces for elementary students, I said yes right away. The very next thing I did was open Notion — my favorite app for note-taking, planning, and more. It’s where I planned all 88 pieces of my Keys at Play book, too, so I already knew it could handle a big project!

Composing a collection of piano pieces means juggling a lot of moving parts: title ideas, research, drafts, revisions, deadlines, and emails with my editor. Here’s a peek at how I kept Starbound organized from the first idea to the finished book.

One home for the whole project

Everything for Starbound lives on one Notion page. At the very top, I tucked my editor’s original invitation into a toggle so I could quickly look back what Alfred was hoping for: about 10 pieces an early to mid elementary level, and an outer-space theme.

Below that are tabs for each part of the project: Brainstorming, Planning, the Foreword, Space Facts, and a Pagination Chart showing which pieces goes on which pages of the book. Nothing gets lost in a random document or email thread.

A database of pieces

The heart of the page is a table with one row for each piece. For every piece, I track things like:

• Title
• Level, key, tonality, and meter
• Order in the book
• Status: Drafting ? Revising ? Ready for editor ? Sent to editor
• A screenshot of the first line, so I can recall each piece at a glance especially if I am still settling on a title
• My own star rating (yes, I rate my own pieces!)

This turned out to be really helpful for balancing the collection. With everything in one view, I could easily see if I had too many pieces in the same key or meter, or which pieces still needed attention the most.

A place to collect inspiration

Many ideas of pieces were inspired by NASA’s Artemis II mission in April 2026. As I followed the mission, I took notes about things that inspired me — complete with links to photos, videos, and quotes from the astronauts. When it was time to write the space facts to include in the book or prepare my presentation for the recent Alfred webinar showcase, all my research was there waiting for me.

I also kept a running list of title ideas. Some of my favorites didn’t make it into this book, but they’re saved for the future!

Bigger-picture planning

Starbound sits inside a larger Alfred Publishing page where I keep notes on submission guidelines, a to-do list, and a list of my published pieces to date. I like maintaining a list of the compositions and arrangements I’ve done for Alfred so far. It’s like my own private composition portfolio.

Try this, with or without Notion

Whether you use Notion or something else, these ideas might work for your next project — whether it’s a recital, a studio event, or a composition project of your own:

1. Keep everything in one place. Use one notebook, one folder, or one page.
2. Track the status of each piece or task so you can see your progress at a glance.
3. Save your inspiration as you go. Future you will be grateful!
4. Keep a “someday” list for ideas that don’t fit right now.

Want to learn how to set up something like this?

If you’d like to build your own Notion workspace for your studio, your composing, or your life, I’d love to have you join Amy Chaplin and me for our online workshop, Organize Your Life With Notion. We’ll meet live on Zoom on Thursdays, November 5, 12, and 19, 2026, from 12:00–2:00 pm Eastern. Register by October 7 to save $60! Register here >>>

Your turn: What exciting projects are you working on these days that Notion might be able to help you with in terms of giving you a project headquarters? I’d love to hear in the comment section below!

Read more: 40 Ways to Use Notion as a Music Professional

Hello readers,

I recently appeared as a guest on Jaci Mrozek’s podcast, the Scrappy Piano Teacher. We talked about many topics: piano teaching, experimenting and growing as a teacher, Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory, my composing, and more.

If you’d like to take a listen, check out the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to give Jaci’s work a follow!

Around this time last year, I found and recommended some beautiful yet affordable music ornaments to order as holiday gifts for my piano students. Many of you ordered and told me you were pleased with those ornaments.

The ornaments I found this year aren’t QUITE as fabulous as the ones I found the past two years, but they are classic and still very nice.

For this year, I found these metal treble clef ornaments, as pictured below.

Note: This blog post contains Amazon affiliate links. Thanks for supporting my work!

These ornaments come in quantities of 6, 10, or 24. In certain quantities, you can choose from gold, silver, red, or black metal. I decided to go with the gold this year. The ornaments are medium weight — not heavy, but not lightweight either. I won’t pretend they are made of the highest quality metal ever, but the finish and edges are smooth and elegant enough for my satisfaction.

The ornaments arrived packaged in a box along with pre-cut strands of matching ribbon. Assembly is required to loop the ribbons and attach them to the ornaments. I plan to use a permanent marker write my students’ names and “2026” in small writing on the back of the ornaments.

As I was browsing Christmas ornaments online, my six-year-old daughter caught sight of these sheet music teddy bears. She became very excited and thought I should order those as well. So, I did.

I will pair each ornament with a teddy bear and package them both inside my favorite transparent music note treat sacks. Each student family will receive one of my family holiday cards as well. I give students their gifts a week or two before our winter break from lessons. 

If you are interested in these metal treble clef ornaments and/or the music teddy bears as affordable gifts for your students this year, don’t delay checking them out. Fair warning: Last year, the ornaments I recommended sold out quickly on Amazon and were not available for a time until they were eventually restocked.

More Ideas

In case you missed the ornaments I recommended last year, here they are: these music symbol snowflake ornaments are cleverly hiding music symbols in their designs. More photos here at last year’s post.

The year before that, I found these absolutely stunning accordion fold music ornaments. I ordered them the moment I saw them! See more photos here.

The year before that, I ordered these cute sequin music note keychains. See more photos here.

Still looking for more ideas? Click here to read a whole blog post covering gifts I gave from 2011 to present. In addition, I invite you to browse my Amazon ideas list HERE, which is where I drop ideas I find throughout the year that I might want to consider as holiday gifts or items for my prize box.

I hope you found something fun and inspiring in today’s post. It always feels good to having holiday shopping done early…at least, this portion of it!!

Your turn: Do you enjoy giving a holiday gift to your piano students? What favorite gifts have you given in the past? What do you have planned this year? Leave a comment below this post.

Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed sharing some of the ways I use Notion to organize my teaching, projects, and everyday life. Today, I’m excited to announce that registration is open for this fall’s Organize Your Life With Notion workshop!

If Notion is new to you, Notion is a flexible digital workspace for organizing notes, plans, lists, links, and more. One of the things I appreciate most about it is having one central home for the many areas of my life and work. Instead of letting project ideas, studio information, checklists, and other details scatter across different apps and notebooks, I can organize them in pages that fit the way I work.

I’ll be presenting this live online workshop with my friend and colleague Amy Chaplin of Piano Pantry, a fellow pianist, teacher, and digital organization coach.

We’ll begin with the basics and guide you through building pages, creating a dashboard, using templates, and learning how to create simple systems for tracking information. You’ll also have hands-on project time so you can begin creating your own workspace during the workshop.

Workshop details

• Dates: Thursdays, November 5, 12, and 19
• Time: Noon–2:00 p.m. Eastern
• Format: Live online instruction with hands-on project time
• Experience needed: No advanced technical skills required
• Replay access: Available for six months

Your registration also includes a workbook, our resource hub, and templates designed to give you a practical head start. Basic and Pro packages are available.

Early-bird pricing continues through October 7.

I would love to help you discover how useful Notion can be!

View workshop details and reserve your place >>>

Hello, readers!

As promised, I’m spilling the beans today on a project that has kept me busy over the past several months: a new collection of original piano solos called Starbound published by Alfred Music.

The book contains 11 outer-space-inspired pieces for early elementary and elementary pianists. I can’t wait to tell you more! Starbound will be available to order from Alfred within the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I’d like to invite MTNA members to attend a webinar tomorrow — Friday, September 25, 2026, at noon Eastern — when Alfred Music will showcase my book alongside other new releases.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek — and I hope to see you online tomorrow! I’ll be sharing more about Starbound and demonstrating samples from the collection.

UPDATE: Watch the replay video of the webinar here (or a shorter trimmed segment here).

I hope your school year is off to a great start. I’ve been a little quiet here on the blog as I’ve been working pretty heavily on an exciting project over the past couple of months. I won’t spill the beans yet on quite that, but today I wanted to share a video I recorded yesterday on my new-to-me piano.

This video is a recording of my composition The Lumbering Bear, a piano solo for mid-elementary level pianists. This solo, you might remember, is my first publication with Alfred Music and was released back in March. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing my new piano as well as this piece. I hope the video might be a useful reference for any piano students who learn to play The Lumbering Bear.

To purchase this piece as a digital download (hardcopies not available at present), visit Alfred Music’s website here or at SheetMusicPlus.com here.

Thanks for listening!

As you might recall, a few weeks ago I sold my grand piano with the plan to upgrade to something newer. In the interim, I’ve been depending on my digital pianos. I’ve really missed having an acoustic piano — even more than I thought I would!

I’m happy to say that my piano search is over and I’ve purchased a fantastic piano. Here’s the whole story!

Throughout the spring and early summer, a colleague-friend and I visited various piano stores together. We generally like to get together about once a month to eat out, and it was fun tacking on visits to local piano stores. It was very helpful to play lots of pianos, because I wanted to gain a better sense of what I was looking for in a piano.

At the local Kawai gallery, I had the opportunity to play a Shigeru Kawai piano for the first time. I absolutely fell in love with the sound of it. They had a pre-owned Shigeru piano there, in addition to two new models. I was very interested in the used one, but I wasn’t ready to buy at that point because I had not yet sold my old piano.

A few weeks later, when my old piano was bought by a church in the U.P. (Upper Peninsula of Michigan), I was in a better position to buy — but unfortunately, the pre-owned Shigeru had sold in the meantime as well.

However, I couldn’t get the sound of that Shigeru out of my head. I knew I had to find another used one — either 5’11” or 6’2″ — in my budget. (In case you aren’t familiar with Shigeru Kawai pianos, I’ll share more about them at the end of this blog post.)

I took to the internet and found one listed on the website of a music store called Schmitt Music in Bloomington, Minnesota. My husband and I found cheap airline tickets for me to make a short two-day trip there and back, from a Sunday to a Monday.

It might seem crazy that I traveled to go check out this piano, but I really was quite positive at this point that a Shigeru Kawai was my dream piano! My goals with upgrading my piano were to: buy an excellent instrument that I will be happy with for the rest of my career, pay with cash (I don’t like debt), and buy the best piano I could with the money I had saved plus a financial gift my mother-in-law generously surprised me with to use towards my piano purchase.

I had played many wonderful pianos at various stores, including the Yamaha C-series, certain Steinways (they are all so different!), a Schimmel, a Petrof, and a memorable Mason & Hamlin. Pianos are a very personal thing. For example, one store had a $150,000 Bösendorfer, but I would take a Shigeru Kawai over that any day. I was smitten.

My trip to Schmitt Music went well. I was happy to find that their 2000 Shigeru Kawai SK-2 (5’11”) had the same wonderful sound as the one I had played at my local Kawai gallery. I could sense that it needed some regulation work, but I knew that could be remedied by my piano technician.

Schmitt Music, by the way, is a really neat music store! In addition to being a Steinway store and carrying used and consignment pianos, they are a well-known carrier of instruments from a wide variety of makers. The store featured beautiful rooms for various instrument families: a flute room inspired by luxury jewelry stores, a brass room with dozens of trumpets displayed on a glass wall, a violin room featuring wood cabinetry handmade by the company’s owner, a clarinet room modeled after a coffee shop, and a saxophone room inspired by a speakeasy. The store also has a large section of sheet music to browse, rooms for music lessons, and a recital hall.

Back at home, I arranged for an independent piano technician in the St. Paul area to evaluate the piano for me at the store, just for my own peace of mind. (It’s easy to find a registered piano technician using the Piano Technicians Guild‘s helpful website.) After receiving her report, I reached out to the salesman to make an offer on the piano.

The salesman put my offer before the family selling the piano. (The piano was there on consignment; it had been the studio instrument of a piano teacher who had passed away.) Unfortunately for me, the family did not take the offer and said the price was firm.

After thinking it over, I decided that price was higher than I was willing to pay after taxes and taking into consideration the cost of having the piano moved 10 hours from Minnesota to Michigan. So, I let the salesman know I unfortunately had to walk away. I was disappointed, especially after having traveled to see the piano. But I had to be okay with the fact that perhaps this just wasn’t meant to be my piano.

In a turn of events, however, the sales rep talked to the sellers further on my behalf and they came back with a price closer to my offer. I agreed to that price, and we made the purchase official a day later. This was a rollercoaster of a week emotionally, but I was thrilled that the piano was mine after all!

The next task was finding a piano mover, which proved more challenging than I expected. The salesman was kind enough to get an initial round of quotes. One quote in particular was very competitive, but they would not be in the area to pick up the piano until mid-September and then would deliver the piano to me in mid-October. I did not want to wait three months to get my new piano, so I decided to get another round of quotes from additional piano movers.

Because the salesman at the store was getting married that weekend and I didn’t want to burden him, I did my own research and reached out to about a dozen other companies I found online.

One of them, Metroplex Piano Moving, happened to be planning to be in Arkansas before heading to Michigan over the next week, and they were very willing to stop in Minnesota first to pick up my piano. I was thrilled at the thought of having my piano within days rather than months, so I booked with that company. They did a flawless job delivering my piano safely.

Here is my new-to-me piano in my new home!

It is thrilling to hear that Shigeru sound in my piano room. There is so much range to the sound, and the action is so responsive. The sustain seems to last forever, and the bass register sounds like a much bigger piano than 5’11”. I feel blessed to own this piano. I’m still pinching myself!

Now that the piano is here, I’ve found myself appreciating even more the story behind the Shigeru Kawai line. In case you aren’t familiar with Shigeru pianos (I wasn’t, until recently), here’s a little history lesson.

The Kawai piano company was started by Koichi Kawai (1886–1955) in the 1920s. His son-in-law, Shigeru Kawai (1922–2006), started working in the company as a lowly factory worker and worked his way up in the company. He took over as president at the age of 33 after Koichi suddenly died in 1955.

The ambition to add a premium-line piano to the Kawai line-up began in the early 1970s. The company began stockpiling wood — aging timber for beams, soundboards, and rims — even before any designs existed. The goal was to create the premier piano of Japan, competitive with the world’s best European and American instruments.

In Japanese culture, attaching both given name and surname to a product is a personal pledge. By naming the line Shigeru Kawai, the chairman staked his family honor on it.

Shigeru’s son, Hirotaka Kawai, became president of the company in 1989, with Shigeru continuing on as chairman from 1990 to 2002. Shigeru spent those chairman years developing the premium line. The Shigeru Kawai (SK) series launched in 1999 under Hirotaka’s presidency but as Shigeru’s personal project. Shigeru pianos feature a variety of innovations designed to give them a responsive action and singing tone.

There are six models available in the Shigeru series, all grand pianos, and all hand-built at the Ryuyo Grand Piano Facility near Hamamatsu by a small group of Master Piano Artisans (MPA). The SK-2 is a 5’11” salon grand; the SK-3 is 6’2″; the SK-5 is 6’7″; the SK-6 is 7′; the SK-7 is 7’6″; and the SK-EX is a 9’1″ concert grand. Each Shigeru Kawai piano ships with a certificate bearing the signature and biography of the MPA responsible for it. In fact, if you purchase a brand-new Shigeru, an MPA will come to your home within the first two years for concert-level regulation, voicing, and tuning.

The Kawai company continues today under the leadership of Hirotaka’s son, Kentaro Kawai, and is poised to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2027.

Although Shigeru Kawai pianos may not yet have the same level of name recognition as some other top-tier brands, they have been gaining recognition on the international stage: the SK-EX was chosen as the official piano of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition and has been selected by finalists and prizewinners at major competitions.

If you ever have the opportunity to play a Shigeru, I hope you’ll give it a spin!

My Shigeru Kawai SK-2 was the 9th of 100 pianos built in 2000, as this plaque denotes.

One of the things I like about this particular piano is the unique styling of the legs and music rack.

I love the look of historic pianos, so I really appreciate this nod to the past.

It feels great to have an acoustic piano in my home again. And this one already feels like it belongs here. I’m having a great time getting acquainted with my new piano and introducing it to my students.

Thanks for reading my story and allowing me to introduce my piano to you! I’m sure you’ll be seeing it in the background of many blog photos for years to come.

I’ve just finished updating one of the studio business forms from my Printables page for the 2025-26 school year: the Lesson Attendance & Payment Sheet PDF.

Although I no longer use this particular sheet in my own studio — I currently prefer charging a monthly flat tuition rate (see this post to read more on that) — I still hear from teachers every year asking whether I’ll be updating it for the new school year. And I’m always glad to make it available!

If this printable is new to you, here’s the basic idea. Write your students’ names in the first column. Then, each week, write the lesson date — using a month/date format — in that week’s column. This gives you a simple way to track attendance at a glance. The small circles in each cell are for marking tuition payments. Whether you charge by the week or by the month, you can place a checkmark beside each paid lesson date.

You can download it below, or find it anytime on the Printables > Studio Business page.

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

Last week, I offered a summer music camp for my piano students.

Despite how much I love running summer camps, it’s actually been a handful of years since I last offered one! The reason for the break was a combination of factors: relocating in December of 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a few years of pregnancies and raising my daughters through the baby/toddler stages.

Now that my own two children are a little bit older and my studio is made up almost entirely of local Michigan students, I decided this was the year I wanted to get back to offering a summer camp.

I quickly learned, upon surveying my studio families, that in the Ann Arbor area, summer camp information is typically published in January. I was very last-minute with getting my dates and details together, but I hoped I would get a small group of students registered this year nonetheless. I added a reminder in my calendar to start planning earlier next year.

My own daughters were extremely excited about my summer camp endeavor. My six-year-old was a great helper with setting up the space and materials for camp.

I gave my three-year-old a trial run on the first day, telling her she could continue attending the camp if she was on her best behavior. She did great.

On the final day of camp, I was also grateful to have one of my high school students assist as a volunteer helper.

Because I sold my grand piano two weeks ago, I have a giant hole in my studio room that was the perfect spot for setting up card tables for camp.

As I’ve done for many years back when I lived in Ohio, I typically run my Music History Blast from the Past camp as a four-day experience, meeting two hours each day Monday through Thursday.

I informed my students on the first day that a main objective of this camp is to learn to listen to an unfamiliar piece of classical music and identify the style period (or, at least, take a good guess). This is the same goal my college professor had for us during the first semester of music history class. Younger students can do it too!

I used my own bestselling Great Composers & Their Music lapbook curriculum for this camp, plus some of the resources from my Eras of Music History Resource Kit (one of my most underrated items in my digital shop, in my opinion).

To see in detail how I structure and lesson plan each day of camp, see this post. But basically, we dedicate time each day to studying a style period (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th/21st Centuries) and a given composer from that style period.

Here’s a peek at how the week unfolded.

This year, the four composers I chose to study from each style period were George Frideric Handel, Franz Joseph Haydn, Robert Schumann, and Scott Joplin. Students had a great time assembling their lapbook — a bit like an interactive scrapbook — each day while I read the composer biography to them.

Halfway through each day, we enjoyed a simple snack break. (My go-to snacks for camp are pretzels, fruit snacks, grapes, and popsicles.)

At the end of each day, we had a listening activity. First, we listened to examples of music from that day’s studied style period and discussed the musical elements we heard that are distinct to that period. Then, we had a listening quiz where I played examples of music from the previous day’s style period as well as the newly studied period, and students identified the style period. I also asked them to explain the clues they heard that led them to their answer.

Students learned to listen for polyphony — layers of melodies — as a clue for the Baroque era, for example. Hearing homophony — a single clear melody with accompaniment — and/or Alberti bass offered clues for music of the Classical period. They also noted the virtuosity and extreme dramatic changes in works from the Romantic period, and the dissonance and extended techniques used in works from the 20th and 21st centuries.

The music excerpts I chose to play for my students were of course somewhat obvious examples, however, I feel it is still quite an accomplishment that they can hear these clues and make a reasonable guess as to the style period just by listening!

If you’d like to try this listening quiz activity with your students, you’re welcome to use my YouTube playlist here.

I’m so pleased with how camp went this year, and I’m already looking forward to offering another camp next year.

I recently said goodbye to my piano.

I’ve been setting money aside for many years in hopes of someday upgrading my piano, and this year is finally the year. So, over the past few months, I’ve been visiting various piano stores to play lots of instruments and get a better sense of what’s out there.

It has been a fun and fascinating process. I’m learning more about the kind of sound and touch I’m drawn to. A local colleague-friend has joined me for many of these piano-shopping adventures. It’s really nice to have someone along who can listen with me and talk through impressions afterward.

Pretty early in the process, the piano stores let me know they weren’t interested in taking my old piano as a trade-in because of its age. It‘s a 6’1” Kawai grand from 1966. It still has plenty of life left and a beautiful sound I’ve always enjoyed, so I listed it for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

As I was preparing the listing, my piano technician offered to give the piano a thorough cleaning. I gladly took him up on it, and he did an absolutely incredible job. In fact, I found myself wishing I had done it years ago so I could have enjoyed the results myself all this time!

In addition to removing the dust from the soundboard and around the tuning pins, he was able to make the strings shine a bit. And he treated the pedals so they look basically new again.

After a few weeks on Facebook Marketplace, I found a buyer. My piano’s new home is at a church in the U.P. (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan). I’m so pleased to know it will continue to be played, heard, and appreciated in a church setting.

I have been the happy owner of this piano for 15 years. I purchased it from a Craigslist seller in 2011 (read the blog post about that here), shortly after finishing my master’s degree. It has been such a reliable instrument for my teaching and playing.

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you might remember that my husband and I have moved a number of times: first within Ohio, and then ultimately to Michigan, where we are both originally from. This piano traveled with us to each home. It has been part of so many lessons, practice sessions, recordings, and memories along the way.

(For a blast from the past, check out these old blog posts and notice my piano in the photos: Starting my Piano Studio in Ohio; First Moving Adventure; Second Moving Adventure; Third Moving Adventure; Relocating to Michigan.)

Saying goodbye to this piano has definitely been bittersweet. Even my three-year-old felt it — on the day it sold, she cried about saying goodbye to Mommy’s piano! This instrument has been with me through so much. At the same time, I’m excited to be moving toward something newer.

I don’t yet know exactly what my next piano will be, but I have my eye on a few possibilities. I’m sure I’ll write another blog entry when I find it.

In the meantime, my piano studio room has a very noticeable empty spot. I’m getting by with my digital pianos, but I do miss having an acoustic piano. I know it will be worth the wait in the end!

Stay tuned.