How Long Should a Child Practise Piano Each Day

For most children learning piano, the useful number is smaller than parents expect. Ten to twenty minutes a day, done properly, beats an hour on Sunday. Here is how to think about it.

Rough Guidance by Age

These are starting points, not rules. A focused child of six can outwork a distracted child of ten. Adjust to the child in front of you.

• Ages 5 to 7: around 10 minutes a day, five or six days a week. Short sessions match short attention spans. Two sessions of five minutes is fine.
• Ages 8 to 11: around 15 to 20 minutes a day. This is enough to make steady progress through early grades.
• Ages 12 and up, or exam preparation: 25 to 40 minutes a day, more in the weeks before an exam.

Why Frequency Beats Length

Playing the piano is physical skill learning, like handwriting or a sport. The brain consolidates that kind of skill between practice sessions, especially during sleep. Five short sessions across a week give the brain five chances to consolidate. One long session gives it one.

This is why a child who practises ten minutes daily almost always progresses faster than one who does seventy minutes in a single sitting, even though the weekly total is the same.

What Good Practice Actually Looks Like

Repeating a whole piece from the top ten times is not practice, it is rehearsal, and it mostly reinforces the mistakes. Good practice is narrower:

• Pick the one or two hardest bars, not the whole piece.
• Play them slowly, hands separately if needed, until they are clean three times in a row.
• Join them to the bar before and the bar after.
• Only then play the section up to speed.

A child needs to be taught this. Left alone, almost everyone defaults to playing the easy parts and stopping at the hard ones. Part of every lesson is showing the student how to run their own practice.

When a Child Does Not Want to Practise

Usually one of three things is happening: the piece is too hard and feels hopeless, the piece is boring, or progress has been invisible for too long. All three are fixable, and all three are the teacher's job to catch.

A Simple Routine that Helps

Practise at the same time each day, attached to an existing habit, such as straight after dinner. Keep the instrument out and ready, not packed away. End each session on something the child can already play well, so the last feeling is a good one.