Month: February 2013

Balloons In The Piano Room

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Music Balloons

Quick and fun theory review!

At our practice achievement celebrations this week, I drew music theory concepts on balloons and had students randomly pick 2-3 balloons. I told them that if they could correctly identify what was on the balloon, they could pop the balloon. If they correctly identified all 3 of them then they also got the joy of taking a purple balloon home with them.

I got the idea for this activity while reading Ron Clark’s book, The End of Molasses Classes. It is an AWESOME read!

I used different variations of the activity also.

Sight Reading Balloon

Sight Reading

Note Identification

Note Identification

Finally, my favorite variation – In Family Feud Style I gave 2 students each a blank balloon. I sat them in chairs back to back and told them they had 20 seconds to draw as many music symbols as they could think of on the balloon. Whoever had the most would get to pop the balloons.

They had a blast with it!

symbols

Grammy Awards for Private Teachers

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If  you watched the Grammy Awards a few days ago you know that this year they made a huge announcement. For the very first time they are creating a GRAMMY for music teachers! Hooray! The GRAMMY Foundation and The Recording Academy  are recognizing the efforts of the people who teach artists the skills they use to make Grammy worthy music. That is something every music educator can celebrate.

Then came the slap in the face – only classroom teachers in a private or public school are eligible for the award.

Say what?

Regular readers of this blog know how I support the work that classroom music teachers do. So, please know that I agree that they deserve the opportunity to win a GRAMMY. The last time I checked, though, to get really good at playing music most people need a private teacher in addition to their school music teacher. That’s why school music teachers often give parents a list of private instructors when kids join orchestra and band.

So, I believe that it’s up to us as music teachers to say this to the GRAMMY Foundation and ask them to consider making the award open to private music teachers. If you’re willing to join me in this, leave a comment below. Tell us about the private teachers that have influenced you and how their contribution has impacted your musical skills. Share this post with your students, parents, and social networks. Let your voice be heard!

Update on Scale Links Project

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This spring my students are concentrating on learning and perfecting the major scales and pentascales. The younger students are working to learn all 12 pentascales and the older students are tackling the major scales. Their goal is to not only be able to play them fluently but to know the note names for each scale. Each time a student successfully learns a scale they add a link to their scale chain as shown above. So far, two students are tied for first place with 5 scales!

The biggest challenge so far has been helping students understand that they cannot earn a link on the same day they are introduced to the scale. They have a hard time understanding that just because they can play through the scale does not mean they know it! So, each week at the beginning of the lesson they have to play the scales they already earned links for in addition to any new scale they practiced during the week. This is helping them to realize that they have to stay on top of those scales!

What do you do to encourage students to become fluent in playing scales? Tell us in a comment below!

Valentine Steps

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valentine

Here is a quick activity to get the lesson started – especially on Valentine’s Day. Students can practice recognizing and playing stepping patterns on random notes. You could also have the student try to find the matching pattern. (There is one matching set). For extra fun see if the student notices that the hearts form a star in the middle! You can download a copy of this activity here.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Pinterest Inspired – Music Heals Broken Hearts!

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Broken Hearts

Pinterest has got to be one of the greatest resources for inspiration that I’ve ever come across! While browsing the site recently I came across an activity from a school party that used broken hearts to review numbers that was pinned by Ann Berman. Someone suggested making a music matching game with this idea, so I did! I used it as a review for note and rest values. My 3 year old student LOVED it. The game was very easy to make. I used foam hearts and a sharpie to draw a quarter note, half note, whole note, and their corresponding rests on one half of each heart. On the other I wrote the number value. Then I cut the hearts down the middle in different shapes to make unique puzzles in order to make the activity self-correcting.

Do you use Pinterest? If so, leave your link in a comment below. Then hop on over to my Pinterest page and check out some of my boards.

 

Free “A Major Scale” mp3

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If you’ve been following my last few posts, you know that my students are in the middle of a Scales Links Challenge. To help  them remember the notes for the scales I’ve recorded some original scale songs. You can download the A Major Scale song, “A-A-A I Like To Play” for free here!

Learning Scales and Understanding Songs

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Here’s a quick way to help students understand where scales end and how LOTS (most?) of the songs they are learning move:

You wake up in the morning at home and you go to various places throughout the day, but you don’t move in with somebody else at the end of the day – you go back home!

Musical translation #1- when playing your scales you will end on the same note you started with.

Musical translation #2 – Songs often end on their key note. For example if a song is in the key of G Major its last note is typically G.