Our 10-year blogiversary celebration sale continues this month! Don’t forget to take advantage of the promo code, if you’re planning to, before the end of February!
Today, I want to highlight an item from my shop you might be interested in: the Ice Cream Interval game. There’s also a freebie for your young beginners below…so keep reading!
Being able to recognize the placement of and distances between notes on the staff intervallically is crucial to reading music. I like to tell my students that music reading involves more interval recognition than it does note identification. To help my students learn to identify intervals quickly upon sight, I created the Ice Cream Interval game.
The cards show intervals both on the staff lines and on the piano keys, so students are encountering situations.
This simple game works great as a single person activity. We lay out the cones on the floor, and start sorting the interval “scoops” to the appropriate cone.
If student has not yet learned the larger intervals, you can sort out the appropriate cards in advance. I decided to assemble additional sets of the game for this purpose, so I can have versions that are pre-sorted and ready-to-go.
This game remains one of my favorites for my students! Watch a video of me using the Ice Cream Interval game during a piano lesson here.
The Ice Cream Interval game also works well as a group activity. Students can work together to sort all the scoops appropriately.
There is also a way to play a competitive group game, where students take turns drawing a scoop card and verbally identifying the interval. If they get it correct, they get to add the scoop to their personal cone. If they get it incorrect, they lose their turn and the scoop goes to the bottom of the pile. Students usually do very well, because they don’t want to answer incorrectly. We usually end up with two-way or three-way ties for 1st place at the end of the game. 🙂
When you purchase the Ice Cream Interval Game PDF from my shop, you will receive an email receipt within a few minutes containing the link to download your file. The PDF contains 60 different ice cream scoops, the ice cream cones printed “Unison” through “Octave”, 4 blank ice cream cones, and instructions for gameplay. I recommending printing the PDF out on sturdy cardstock paper (lamination optional). Cutting out all the ice cream scoops will take some time, so I recommend watching in a good movie while you cut. 🙂
Allow me to leave you with a freebie: a download of a simplified version of the Ice Cream Interval game, perfect for your preschoolers or other young beginners. The intervals are limited to 2nds and 3rds on the keyboard only. Visit the Printables > Games page and scroll down to the I’s for Ice Cream Intervals game — or, use the link below:
Ice Cream Interval game - SAMPLE (2.9 MiB, 20,650 hits)
Thanks for reading! You can visit the Ice Cream Interval game page in my shop here.
What other ways do you help students learn to recognize intervals? Please share in the comments!
