I am a pre grade 1 piano learner. Obviously I can not look at a piece of music from scratch and instantly play it. I look at each bar and play it slowly,
LH and RH seperatly untill it get a grasp of the piece. Eventualy after a bit of practice I can then muddle my way through the piece using both hands.
But the thing that concerns me, is after a day or so practice I have memorised the piece and I am not sure if I am subconsciensly reading the notes/sight reading, or wheather I
am playing from memory. As far as sight reading goes I am able to do most of the exercises in the Paul Harris imporove your sight reading grade 1 book, all but a bit slowly, and with some mistakes. I am not sure
if I have expalined my dilemma well enough. I just really want to know if I am doing things right. Thanks for any of your comments and thoughts.

It sounds to me like you are doing fine. If you practice a lot you cannot but help to a tleast partly memorize the pieces you are working on. I would not worry about it. On the contrary you should be pleased to have that ability.

There is an easy test off how thoroughly memorized the pieces are. Can you play them entirely without the score. If yes then you have memorized the whole piece (though you may be relying excessively on "hand memory" and not enough on understanding the music -= but don't worry - that will also come with time and studies in ear-training and harmony).

If you stumble, then when you play from the score you are probably playing partly from memory, and partly usingthe sight of the score (not necessarily reading it - more in providing another familiar component of the environent) to prompt the correct actions.

Hi there. Thanks for your reply. I guess the best thing to do is alot more sight reading of non exam pieces and keep up the practice with the Paul Harris books.

Good idea I've found that nearly all pupils at that level (especially if they have a good ear) do tend to memorise pieces and I think it's a mixture of the fact that they spend more time learning the notes well, and that the pieces themselves tend to be simpler to remember?

Sight reading lots and lots of other music of the same standard is great, and something people don't do enough of at that stage either - I didn't - so you'll save a lot of trouble in the future by doing it now

I'm not learning piano, I'm an adult learner of clarinet, but from my experience I'd say that it's impossible to avoid memorizing to a certain extent, especially the really simple things you start out on. I wouldn't worry too much about it stopping you learning to sight-read at this stage. I do conciously try to avoid memorizing things (I'm not very good at it anyway, and the onlty thing that has really stuck, by accident, is The Entertainer), and I find one thing that's good for sight reading is to try and sight read everything the first time you come accross it. You will probably make a total mess of it, even get hopelessly lost after the first few notes, but I always like to have a go nonetheless. I can now, almost, sight read unfamiliar things that I would have found difficult to even practise when I was at that level. I think you're only expected to sight read about two grades behind where you currently are, so at 'pre grade 1' I wouldn't worry about it too much.