Well, all the practice elves found a home this week. Have you been having some fun with your elf yet or are you waiting until December 1st to officially start? Or maybe you feel like you don’t know where to begin and are looking for some ideas? Here are some of my suggestions for you:

You can move the elf from piece to piece each night and just have your child start there piano practice where the elf is. This will ensure there is a little variety each day in there practice. Wherever the elf is will be where their practice begins, then they would continue as they normally would

You can put the elf on a piece they’ve never seen before or played from their book and then they would have to begin their practice by sight-reading that piece.

The elf could be placed on a piece of music with special instructions to call a grandparent or aunt or uncle and play the piece over the phone for them. Or it could have special instructions for how many times to play the piece that day (ie “Play this piece 3 times at 7:45am and then again at 4pm) Or the elf could simply be encouraging saying something like, “You’re awesome!”
For a little help and creativity with these ideas, try printing off some speech bubbles: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=speech+bubble+prinouts&qpvt=speech+bubble+prinouts&FORM=IGRE

If you think that the Christmas piece is the one piece in particular that needs the help then use the elf and the speech bubbles to assign a new and different way to practice it each day (ie 4 times slow like a turtle, play over phone for 3 friends, play it with your eyes closed once after 3 times through, etc, etc, etc)

So, have you named your elf and begun the fun…if so, I’d love to hear about it! Share you elf’s name and post any pictures of it’s shenanigans to our facebook page so we can all enjoy the fun and creativity!