There is one practice that a lot of piano students make that is not a tool I would use. Some students think that they will learn to read the notes quicker if they write the names of the notes under every single note. I understand that they all genuinely want to maximize their efficiency by writing in the note names, but I think it is only a short cut for learning that particular piece of music and I believe it actually delays learning to read the notes.
Don’t misunderstand me here, I know that writing in the name of the odd note here and there is very useful in both learning the piece of music and learning what the name of a particular note is. I get that I seemed to have contradicted myself here so let me explain further; if you are learning a new piece of music and there is one note in a particular spot and you keep playing it wrong, you need to fix that mistake as soon as possible. The reason you need to fix the mistake sooner rather than later is that if you keep playing a wrong note, you will get used to the sound of the wrong note and therefore when you go about correcting it, the right note will sound wrong to you. Also if you play a wrong note, your hand and finger will get used to moving a certain way at a certain time to play the wrong note. This is also known as muscle memory, where your finger will automatically go to the wrong note.
So obviously fixing a wrong note as soon as you possibly can is important for learning a new piece of music as efficiently and as quickly as possible and writing an odd note name here or there will help you. However, if you are just starting to learn to play the piano and learning to read music, writing in all the note names will not help you learn to read what the notes are called any faster. Actually it will delay how quickly you can learn to read the individual notes accurately because when they are all written in, a person will look at the note name and not the note itself and therefore will not associate the name of the note with what it looks like.
It’s interesting that I have had this debate with so many students and I have managed to convince them all eventually. I know I am correct because I have inherited piano students from other teachers who have learned to play the piano through piano courses that print all the note names in. Sometimes these piano students have been learning this way for up to 2 years. It has not been a waste of time, they have learned about rests, timing, fingering and hand positioning but when I give them a piece of music that is suitable for a student that has only been learning for a month, that has no note names written in- they just can’t play it because they have not learned how to recognize the various notes.
If you want to learn to read the notes as soon as you possibly can, then I recommend you get a printout that includes a visual of a piano keyboard with the names of the notes and a stave (or staff) that has the corresponding notes. Here’s a good one:http://pianoforretirees.com/piano-notes-chart/
The way to use it is have it with you when you are practicing the piano and anytime you don’t know a note or just unsure that you know it , you can look it up. I know this may sound laborious but every time you look up a note, you are further cementing in your brain, what the note(s) look like and what they are called until eventually you just know what the note is.