Kirsten Rielly - West Harbour Piano Studio

Kirsten Rielly - West Harbour Piano Studio I believe everyone is profoundly musical. If you want to play the piano, you can!

14/08/2026

Here is Sara with a beautiful performance of Interstellar x Solas. Thank you, Sara, for sharing your magical playing with us! 💖🎹💐🎶

Here is a beautiful poem about all the intricacies of learning the piano (the learning never truly stops, by the way!). ...
22/06/2026

Here is a beautiful poem about all the intricacies of learning the piano (the learning never truly stops, by the way!). It was written by Jackie Sharp.

We are welcoming Artie-Bear and Sorbet Unicorn to the studio this week! These little guys will be helping us with a goal...
21/06/2026

We are welcoming Artie-Bear and Sorbet Unicorn to the studio this week! These little guys will be helping us with a goal-setting challenge in Term 3.

Each week, my students and I will be working together to set small, specific, and personalised weekly goals. For each goal achieved, students will get a point/sticker and after a certain number of stickers (TBD!), they can choose a Palm Pal from Book Hero in Hobsonville.

Apart from the fact that I have a soft spot for cute soft toys, there are lots of great reasons for doing this challenge. Here are just a few!

🎹 Focusing on the process rather than the outcome

Weekly goals shift the emphasis onto the small habits and behaviours that lead to progress. Progress happens through consistency and small, manageable steps.

🎶 Fostering a growth mindset

Personalised goals teach students that improvement comes through effort and persistence. Students begin to think:
"I can improve if I work on this specific thing."

🎼 Personalisation

Because the goals are individualised, every student can experience success on their own terms.

🎹 Gaining valuable life skills

Goal-setting teaches students to:

*Plan
*Monitor their progress
*Reflect on what worked
*Evaluate their own learning

These are valuable life skills that extend well beyond music.

🎶 Building consistency and more deliberate practice

Research shows that improvement comes from focused, purposeful practice rather than only playing pieces from beginning to end. Weekly goals help students practise intentionally:

"Today I am working on my staccato" instead of "I played my pieces three times."

This often leads to faster and more satisfying progress.

🎼 It's fun!

I love giving things to my students. It is fun to hand out cute prizes and these Palm Pals are just so adorable. More importantly, I think it is fun and rewarding to feel our skills growing and overcoming something that feels hard to begin through consistent and targeted effort is worth celebrating!

11/06/2026

I don’t know why all the kids laugh at me when I put on my glasses and try to be the stern teacher 🤷‍♀️

😆

We had some fun in the studio tonight making a little video for light relief in between some intense work on exam pieces. We hope it makes you laugh too! 💖🎹💖

09/06/2026

A learned Remember Me for her exam last year. This is her most recent performance of it - it is so great that she has kept playing it even though the exam has been and gone.

Our past pieces continue to grow as we continue to grow. We don’t play pieces we learned six months, one year, or five years ago in the same way we did when we first learned them - that’s why it is so important (and fun!) to go back to old pieces and play them. They are a great marker of our progress and can provide us with a sense of mastery. Alongside learning new repertoire, having pieces we can sit down and play whenever we want to is a very important part of the musical journey.

This piece also means a lot to A’s mum so she asks her to play it from time to time. This is a wonderful thing for parents and caregivers to do to encourage practising and playing - simply ask the student to play a favourite piece or something they have learned and express to them how much you enjoyed hearing them play. Kids love to feel they have done something nice for their parents, and that the adults in their lives enjoy what they show them.

Enjoy this beautiful performance 💖🎹💖

05/06/2026

Here’s another superstar student! A and I are continuing to play Heart and Soul as a duet but A also went on to create her own rendition using her duet part as the jumping off point. Using her own knowledge of chords and her ear, she has given it her own flair! Enjoy her joyful performance 🎹💖🎹

04/06/2026

Here is my amazing student, E, performing again at her recent school showcase. Students have to send an audition tape and are then selected to play at these showcases twice a year.

E chose to play her own arrangement of a song called Glorious, which is from an animated show called Rock Dog. In a lesson last year, she asked to learn it. I had never heard of it and, when we looked for music, we couldn't find anything useful.

I said to her how about we do it by ear ourselves? So, that's what we did! We had such a fun time doing it together. And here she is performing a song she loves that she arranged herself and that doesn’t exist anywhere else!

Well done! 💖🎹💖

04/06/2026

Recently, we had an unexpected but fortuitous opportunity to get a couple of students together to make music. Here are two of my wonderful students who had never met before and this is their very first time playing together.

C is playing Sad Times by Daniel Macfarlane from SuperSonics and L is playing her own music along in time and in keeping with C! It was such a lovely moment and I’m so happy L’s mum captured it on video.

Sharing the joy of music with each other is so affirming and special!

My clever, multi-talented student gave me these beautiful items she made herself - a scrunchie and a mat for my new musi...
31/05/2026

My clever, multi-talented student gave me these beautiful items she made herself - a scrunchie and a mat for my new music room.

Thank you for these special gifts! 💖🎹💖 I love them

30/05/2026

Playing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with one of my youngest students. She actually taught it to herself so we could jump straight into the duet.

We are really enjoying having multiple pianos in the new studio too!

Well done! 💖🎹💖

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Auckland
0618

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+6421406981

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