By learning how to read music notation, you can read and play almost anything at the piano. When a student learns how to read notes, rhythm, and expression markings, music notation becomes understandable and familiar. Ask a student to read the title of a piece of music. The words will likely roll right off their tongue! How do they know how to do that? They learned how to read by slowly sounding out each letter of each word. Then they slowly started reading words with a little pause between the words. Before too long, they were reading fluently and smoothly, as though they'd been doing it their whole life. It's the same thing with music. We start with a few sounds (notes) and constantly practice them every day. If a student practices notes only 30 minutes once a week at their lesson [four times a month], it will take them a very long time to learn how to become a fluent music reader. But, when they know those few sounds, we gradually add a few more notes, so they can play with more sounds. At the same time, they're learning more about the language of music - simple rhythms and other markings.
You might not be able to play soccer until you're 105 (but, you might!), but you can always play piano your whole life!