Some new supplies

This is a great time to go shopping for supplies to use in your studio. All the stores have their back to school items at less-than-normal prices. I’ve posted a picture of some items I bought. Here they are clock-wise from the bottom right.

These little see-through self-sticking strips are great for highlighting music that you don’t want to mark up. You can write on it, or just leave it plain. Sometimes the student and I will mark sections of music together, with the same section having the same color. Or we will mark same and different phrases. You can pull all the strips off when you need to. After I bought them, I found some at Wal-Mart a lot cheaper.

Of course, these stickies can get expensive, so I also use highlighting markers. I like the set in this photo because it has the ever elusive and hard to find purple. This set was very inexpensive in the school supply section. You can do the same thing with  highlighters as you with the strips, for a lot cheaper, just not as much fun.  For beginners who are in pre-reading books, I like to mark the right and left hand with different colors. I have found that marking the hands with different colors can really take away a lot of anxiety for the young beginning student or the student with learning differences.  We also highlight dynamics, tempo, and just about anything.  I like to choose the color of markers to go with the seasons.  Purple and orange are my October colors. I think I’ve mentioned before that I love color!

I also picked up some “Post-it” flags. I use them to mark pages and anything else I can think of. They make a quick way to mark mistakes on music you want to keep clean and they are also see through.

I found these counting chips in the teacher supply department of Staples. I was looking for something to use in my Cover the Keys game. These are perfect, and I can use them with some of my other bingo games, too. I saw some very inexpensive *play money* there, for teachers who want to use play money for rewards. It’s cheaper than some of the commercial composer-type money, in case you want to try it out. You can order the composer money later if it turns out to be a good incentive.

If anyone else has some favorite supplies, send me an email and I’ll share it with the world!