Good beginner piano books?

[Justin Havu]

So, I help out at a local Christian school, doing A/V, as well as some music stuff, and I started teaching piano last year for a 5th-grader, and he's doing okay at it.  I've been creating material from scratch for him to study and learn, basically simple lead sheets (melody and chords, with the chord fingerings notated.)  Now, I want to get him playing both hands independently (some really simple Bach stuff, like WTC I Prelude in C), and really get him good at reading.  I told him if he can get good at reading music, he can pretty much learn anything.  I haven't really started ear-training yet, but that may be coming soon.

 

Now, I may have another 4th-grader interested in taking piano lessons from me, and this time, I'd like to look into using some beginner books, instead of creating the material from scratch.

 

Anyone have any suggestions?

[JamPro]

Czerny - Practical Method for Beginners on the PianoForte - Op. 599.  This a good book for beginners: a graded series of piano exercises written as songs.  The easiest ones are note recognition, so useful for those learning to read music; the more advanced ones are intermediate level pieces.  The pieces are short so students can learn the whole piece pretty quickly.

[CEB]

I like the David Carr Glover Series. It’s structured.  There are 7 Levels, Primer Level and levels 1-6.
 

Each level has:

Piano Student - Main Text Book

Piano Technic - Exercises and studies

Piano Repertoire - Collection of pieces

Piano Theory - Theory Workbook

 

Once you reach the 5th level (Level 4) There are corresponding Jazz Books. 
 

The series might be dated. But I like the pedagogy.  I still believe in  the established classical pedagogy.  Success will depend on how dedicated the student is.  
 

There are other courses available like Thompson, Bastien, Alfred, ect…. I would go to a brick and mortar piano store and review what they have.   My teacher used the Carr Glover series but later once I had some skills, maybe around level 4. Introduced outside

material like Broadway show tunes, additional Bach, Jazz … depended on the student’s interest. 
 

[MathOfInsects]

Yes, it's very dependent on the student and the goals. All the method books do a decent job of introducing basics. I use Faber for child-students and the Alfred Adult Beginner books for adults. The nice thing about the method books is that they have decades of crowd-sourced pedagogy behind them, and do a good job of stepping students through various skills. The downside is that the songs are tedious and don't generally have the "cool" factor that most students need to keep with it, so you have to supplement whenever you can. I also use Dozen-a-Day, which helps some students have a nice little bite-sized accomplishment each week--another good motivator. Same caveat--short and fun as they are, they all contrived to some extent, so anything you can do to supplement will go a long way.

 

You can get creative with these method books as well--have students transpose, or write a chart for them themselves but in 2/4 instead of 4/4, or use them to teach chords and scales related to the original or transposed keys, etc.