Janna's Favorites 2026
Amazon Prime Days are June 23-26, 2026!
Here is a quick compilation of items that I have particularly enjoyed in my studio in the past year. Let me know in the comments what your 2026 favorites have been!
You can see past favorites all compiled on my Amazon storefront here.
Favorite “office supplies” and teaching tools:
Mini Resin Animals 100 Pieces — I’d seen these around as a current kid fad. And decided to buy a set. They fit nicely on top of the keys for theory work and are really cute. I might put little bags of 10 in my prize box in the future. There are all sorts of different assortments available; this was one that had a variety of animals and was inexpensive.
One way I’ve used these: placing animals on the keys of a difficult scale, like C-sharp harmonic minor pictured here.
Ultimate Ears WONDERBOOM 4 Portable Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker — I’ll confess that I haven’t used this much for teaching purposes yet, since I have a dedicated bluetooth speaker in the studio. However, my husband and I gave this to our 16-year-old for Christmas 2025, and it is a really GREAT little speaker! It lives up to the name “Wonderboom,” which is what we call it all the time.
LEVOIT OasisMist 10Liter Smart Humidifier for Home Large Room — We have a larger evaporative humidifier that runs in our upstairs hallway throughout the winter (just above the piano area), but the last few years I’ve felt like it was very dry on our first floor. This dryness can, of course, affect my piano’s ability to hold tune.
A friend recommended this one, and I really love it. It’s completely quiet, minus a very occasional “drip” noise as water resettles. Several of my students particularly enjoyed the humidity digital percentage number display. 🤷♀️
ASTROBRIGHTS MEGA COLLECTION: "Fluorescent" 5-Color Assortment, 625 Sheets, 24 lb — I do all of my recital program printing at Office Depot using the MTNA members discount. However, I like to print simple things at home, such as the studio calendar or similar studio-wide handout. Having a nice assortment of neon-colored paper has been very useful this year, and this pack is affordable for the amount of paper you get.
*Note: the pack linked above is the “Brilliant” color collection since the “Fluorescent” was not available on Amazon at the time of this post. Hopefully the “Fluorescent” will be back in stock soon!
AMAZON BASICS PAPER SHREDDER — My old shredder suddenly stopped working. Amazon Basics to the rescue! This one is much easier to empty and doesn’t clog.
Music books my students and I have enjoyed this year:
LES PETITES IMAGES by Jennifer Linn — I’ve been recommending Jennifer Linn’s Les Petites Impressions book for years as excellent preparatory material for students before they play Debussy or other Impressionistic music. However, temporarily forgot about this book! This year, I had a teenage student with only a couple of years of lessons under her belt who really enjoyed pieces with “exotic” scales like pentatonic and whole tone. After asking for suggestions online, a colleague reminded me of this book. This student was able to play Hummingbird (L'oiseau-mouche) and Winter’s End (Le fin d'hiver) this spring and I was reminded of the several gems in this book!
Listen to an excellent playlist of these pieces on YouTube here.
KEYBOP Volume 1 and Volume 2 by Jason Sifford — Two of my students this year enjoyed the first book in this series as their introduction to “jazzy” styles. Volume 2 is also amazing and I had two selections from it (chosen by different students) on my spring recital in May. The titles are quirky, the pieces are patterned, and there’s always some pedagogical benefit to each piece. All of the pieces in Volume 1 have optional teacher duets while those in Volume 2 are stand-alone solos.
Preview the pieces and listen to free audio recordings on Jason’s site here.
RAVEL: SELECTED FAVORITES Alfred Masterworks edited by Maurice Hinson — My student who was a senior this year asked to play À la manière de Borodine after hearing it on Seong-Jin Cho’s album. I had a hard time tracking down a good edition; for some reason this book was not coming up in whatever internet searches I was doing. I finally found it with the help of a colleague. This is a lovely collection of introductory and beloved pieces by a composer who didn’t write anything easy.
(I’m pleased to say that my student did a very nice job with that piece, and I had a wonderful time getting to know it and teaching it to her!)
ALFRED PREMIER PIANO COURSE MASTERWORKS Book 5 — If you like using books of historical repertoire that correlate with method series, and you use Alfred Premier, make sure you check out the Masterwork books at the higher levels. I have a student who used this book most of this academic year and just started Book 6 at the end of the spring semester. He really likes that “all of the greats” (his words!) are in here - Mozart, Beethoven, etc., and he was very motivated to learn the complete Sonatina by Attwood because that felt very grown up to him. We have not been using the other components of this method at this level, just the Masterworks book. I have some critique of the editing, but I really like the piece selection and several other aspects of this book.
(Also, if you don’t know the old sheet The Great Smoky Mountains by David Carr Glover, it is the last piece in the Lesson Book 4 of the AP method. This student used that as one of his pieces for his Illinois AIM exam this year as it’s listed on our syllabus. It’s one of my all-time favorites!)
KJOS PIANO REPERTOIRE: Romantic & 20th Century edited by Keith Snell — I’ve been a bit hard on this KJOS repertoire series in presentations and on the YouTube channel, but mostly because I disagree with many of the editing choices, particularly in the Baroque and Classical selections. This April I recorded a Teaching Tutorial video for Cavalry Gallop (aka The Horseman) Op.27, No.29 by Dmitri Kabalevsky for my Patreon members, and I was reminded of how much I love the 20th Century selections in this series, particularly in the mid to upper levels.
SIDE BY SIDE DUETS Part 1 — I have been a fan of Amy Glennon’s for the past few years since she published Friends at Last and Here Comes Treble with Piano Safari. However, I also learned this year that she has an older book of student-teacher duets intended to supplement the Music Tree method. This means that the student parts are written with an intervalic reading approach. I have really enjoyed using these as supplemental reading material with one of my elementary students and hope to use them with more students in the future!
Pedagogy and personal development books:
PROFESSIONAL PIANO TEACHING, VOLUME 2 by Jeanine Jacobson — This book has been featured on my lists multiple times because I frequently recommend it to piano teachers.
But this year I’m featuring it again because it’s the textbook for a fall Intermediate Piano Teaching Cohort that I’m excited to host online once again with my dear friend Christina Whitlock. This 12-week study, starting September 4, is your chance to find a clear path forward — alongside a brilliant community of fellow teachers. Together, we’ll unpack the core principles of intermediate piano teaching so you can grow in confidence and support your students more effectively.
➡️ Enroll here- last year’s Cohort sold out quickly, so don’t delay!
THE SUCCESS FACTOR: Making Practice Perfect by Elvina Pearce — This book was the basis for my Patreon Partners Q2 workshop earlier in June. Pearce lays out several principles for good practice habits that she encouraged in her students over her long career, and then works through suggestions for three specific pieces: Mozart’s Fantasy in D minor, Schumann’s Fantasy Dance Op.124, No.5, and Grieg’s Notturno Op.54, No.4.
(Not directly piano-related!)
BOUNDARIES FOR LEADERS: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge by Henry Cloud — While this book is certainly written for the corporate sector, the principles are definitely applicable to independent studio teachers and music teachers in general, and because of that, I’ve used it as part of my presentation titled Stepping Up: The Unexpected Role of Leadership in the Piano Studio
Cloud discusses executive function at length and says that leaders can encourage executive function in their followers, allowing for growth and insight, which “won’t come if a leader is not setting clear boundaries of direction, both positive and negative ones, that define and support the paths for people to attend, inhibit, and remember. Clarity leads to attention and attention leads to results.” p.41
(Not really piano-related at all!)
GAZING AT GOD: A 40-Day Journey to Greater Freedom from Self by Sharon Hodde Miller — This is a new devotional which is a companion to Miller’s earlier book Free Of Me: Why Life Is Better When It's Not About You. I enjoyed Free of Me, but think the devotional is even more profound and helpful for working out the principles described in that earlier book.
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