Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star for beginner piano and late elementary piano students. Starting with a plain melody on middle C, your students can add left hand chords.
Look down the page for SIX versions, from super-easy (music with letters!) to a broken chord left hand accompaniment.
Here is a rather sweet video of this nursery song by "Super Simple Songs":
The chords in this song can all be played by beginners right around the left hand C chord, with no reason to change hand position. A "little F" chord just requires the thumb to stretch to an "a", and the G7 chord can be a "pinch" - "g" and "f" side-by-side. See the version AFTER the one below, to see the chords spelled out in the bass staff.
The next arrangement is the same as the first one, above, but I added fingering in line one to show how finger replacement can work to make the reach up to "a" smooth:
In spite of the fingering I have placed in the music - the five to four and four to five - your student is most likely to COMPLETELY IGNORE those helpful suggestions and just play "1 - 1 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 5..." or something like that! It's up to you the teacher to ingrain the finger replacement technique into your student AT SOME POINT; is now the time?
It depends on you and what you think is most beneficial at this stage of your student's learning. Perhaps just reading the notes and adding left hand chords in the coming weeks will be accomplishment enough! Finger replacement is actually a difficult and advanced technique, though eventually we hope that it will become second nature to our piano students.
Now the following arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star shows how chords can be added to this song:
Following is a broken chord version of this little song that is very pretty. I set it high (good practice for your late elementary/ early intermediate students, to read the left hand in treble clef!) where it has a delicate sound:
Transposing this arrangement would be excellent practice for your late intermediate students who need to firm up their chord inversions in all keys. Actually, transposing ANY of the arrangements on this page would be useful, but this one with the broken chords is very pleasant to play!
Here are the VERY EASIEST approaches to Twinkle Twinkle; a version entirely composed of music notes with letters inside, and a "helper" version that has only a few lettered music notes. Here is a graphic of the Helper version:
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