Improve Your Scales! Piano, Grade 2: Piano Book

Harris strips away the tedium from scale practice by embedding technique into finger fitness exercises, transposition studies, and short musical contexts. Students actually engage with the material because they're solving problems and making music, not grinding through abstraction. The workbook tracks all current exam syllabuses, so you know every student who works through it will have the exact material their examiner expects.

Purposeful and musical rather than mechanical. The workbook keeps technique grounded in playable contexts and short musical ideas, so scales feel like tools for making music rather than hurdles to clear. Students move through material with momentum because each section builds directly on the last.

Grade 2 piano students preparing for ABRSM, Trinity, LCM, or MTB exams will find everything they need in one place. Teachers who want their students to build genuine scale fluency rather than mere memorization will recognize Harris's approach immediately.

• Cycle through a different key each practice session rather than drilling all scales in one sitting. This distributes the cognitive load and builds pattern recognition faster.
• Pair the sight-reading exercises with the scale work so students see how the patterns transfer to real repertoire immediately.
• Have students attempt the simple improvisations first, then return to the mechanical passages. Playing musically first makes the technique feel purposeful rather than punitive.
• Use the broken chords section to strengthen hand independence and voice leading awareness before moving into more complex accompaniment patterns.

Work through it systematically as the technical spine of your grade 2 curriculum, dedicating 10-15 minutes per lesson to one or two keys at a time. The finger fitness exercises double as warm-ups before diving into repertoire, and the sight-reading pages integrate naturally into ongoing reading practice. Time it so students complete all required keys four to six weeks before their exam.

• Major and minor scales across all grade 2 keys
• Arpeggios and broken chord patterns
• Finger independence and hand position stability
• Transposition across related keys
• Quick sight-reading of scale-based passages
• Simple improvisation using scalar material
• Exam-specific technical requirements for ABRSM, Trinity, LCM, and MTB syllabuses