Ideas from Other Teachers

I would like to thank Joanne and Jessica for graciously allowing me to post their ideas.

From Joanne Tadych comes a great song to teach the music alphabet backwards that she offered to share. If you use her song, to the tune of , “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat”, they can easily remember it.

” G G G F E, D D C B A
That’s the music alphabet
backwards everyday”

One of these days, Joanne, I will try to remember to notate this for you.

Jessica posted a very easy and fast game on the Piano Adventures message board, complete with a picture of her game pieces. I love it when I can see a picture of these type of games. She can explain it better than me, so here is her post.

“I am going to play the *racing game* I’ve seen described here at some point at my group class tomorrow. I have students who read on the staff and those who don’t yet. So I am tweaking it by having 2 teams, the staff team and the ABC team. The ABC team members will take turns picking up jewels with alphabet letters on them and going to the piano and placing the jewel on the correct key. I will time them until they have placed all 26 jewels.
The staff team will have staff cards and will come to the keyboard with their card and point to the correct note. I plan to put a plus or minus on the back of the card so there is no embarrassment over answering incorrectly. I will simply tally the pluses and minuses at the end. And factor in the time each team took.”

The day she posted the game i wanted to try it out, so I took the big, colored chips that i use in my Cover the Keys game and labeled them with the music alphabet. I had an almost beginning student coming that day who is just learning CDE, so we only used those keys. In his case, I had him sit across the room and then we timed how long it would take him to run to the piano and put the chips down on the keys. Not only did it break up the lesson and use some of his boyish energy, but he had fun trying to do it faster and faster. When I have a chance I am going to get some of the pretty stones Jessica used.

This morning I decided to take a picture of my game pieces and when I went into my piano studio (fancy way of saying living room) to take the picture, I saw that one of my students had put them on a paper staff that was sitting on my coffee table. I have no idea which student did it yesterday, and the chips are too big for the staff, but I thought it was so cute my student did it without me knowing, I would share with all of you. My coffee table has a bottom shelf and students are always pulling out games and worksheets and using them. After seeing this, I am more determined to go get something that will fit inside this staff!