Congratulations to…
Kathy! You are the winner of the Blank Board Game giveaway! Congratulations!!
Thanks to all who entered and left comments – I enjoyed reading them very much, as usual. If you are interested in buying your own Blank Board Game from Keri and Carolyn, click here to visit their store.
Happy weekend!
Announcing a new giveaway, from the ladies from Piano Stars! You’ve read all about Keri & Carolyn in yesterday’s interview, and now you have a chance to win one of their teaching materials: a Blank Board Game that allows you to customize the game each time you use it!
Continue reading “March 2011 Giveaway: Blank Board Game by Piano Stars”
Meet Keri and Carolyn. They are two cousins and piano teachers out of Canada who teamed up to establish their successful piano studio, Piano Stars. They also sell some unique and original piano teaching materials on their website (click here) and on Etsy. When I stumbled across their Etsy shop one day, I just had to order a couple of their wonderful music spinners (pictured below)! Once I contacted Keri and Carolyn, they kindly agreed to be interviewed and featured here at Color In My Piano. Read on!
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Joy: Please tell us about your piano backgrounds!
Keri & Carolyn: We both started piano lessons when we were 7, but due to our age difference Carolyn was actually my (Keri’s) piano teacher growing up! Carolyn has her ARCT in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music and I am working on my Grade 10 with the Royal Conservatory of Music.
How long have you been running your piano studio together?
We have been working together since 2003 for our summer camps, composing and creating games & teacher resources. However, we both have our own home studios for private lessons and teach about 60 students each.
Even though we teach out of our own homes we plan all of our piano events together. We have the same incentive programs and we combine our students together for recitals, halloween parties, pizza parties, pool parties, etc… Continue reading “Interview: Keri & Carolyn from Piano Stars”
Here’s a fun movement/rhythm game to play with a group of students which I learned from a Dalcroze Eurhythmics instructor. I call it the “Rhythm Magnet Game.”
The great thing about this game is that it helps students learn to associate the sound/experience of each rhythm value with it’s corresponding notation. In Dalcroze and other methodologies (such as Orff), it’s important to experience the concept first and then put the notation and term to it. This is the “sound before sight” principle.
Background: This game is best intended for young children (preschool to beginner piano students). Older students, however, may also find this game beneficial as an rhythm ear training experience and a lesson in keeping an internal pulse. For this activity to be a success, students must have experience with the idea of quarter notes, half notes, dotted half notes, and/or whole notes (but not necessarily with the terms or written notation for each). This game is perfect activity for teaching little ones to associate each rhythm value to its corresponding notation for the first time.
Students playing this game will soon discover that without checking with the pulse, they cannot determine which note value they are hearing. This game is a great movement game to get students up and moving during a group lesson! Have fun!!
To download the rhythm value posters you’ll need for this game, visit the the Printables > Games page and scroll down to the R’s for “Rhythm Magnet Game.” Enjoy!
My colleague Loretta and I have been teaching a pair of beginner students in a group setting each week. Last week, we were learning about 3/4 and 4/4 time, and quarter notes and half notes. Loretta and I wrote rhythms on the whiteboard, asked the students to help us write in bar lines, and then clapped and counted the rhythms together. While this activity worked and was beneficial, what we did this week was much more successful.
On Anne Crosby Gaudet’s website, we discovered her wonderful Music Discoveries Rhythm Blocks pdf. The pieces are easy to print and cut out. In class today, our two beginners were so excited to make their own rhythms and try clapping them. With Ann’s rhythm blocks, it’s easy to tell how many beats each note gets! Click here and scroll down to view Ann’s printable on her website.
Go figure – give students something hands-on and creative, and they will get more out of it! (Especially when the students are young beginners!)
What kinds of hands-on activities have you discovered for your students lately?
Just added to the Printables > Other Resources page: Musical Dice!
This is one of the projects I was working on over Christmas break! I’m happy to now have it finished and posted. =)
Here’s what the PDF contains:
I did it! I created my own Musical Jenga game.
I got the inspiration from the Sing A New Song blog, who in turn got the idea from someone on the Faber Piano Adventures forums. (To view a list of other favorite games with musical spins, click here.)
I found an off-brand version of the Jenga game at Target for about $5. Then using two different colored Sharpie permanant markers, I put various musical terms on the blocks: Continue reading “Musical Jenga!”
Last week as I was browsing through some of my favorite music blogs, it occurred to me that it would be fun to see how many different familiar games music teachers have found ways to alter into music games! And so I’ve started compiling a list:
I recently have made what I have decided to call “Musical AlphaGems.” These fun little gems have many uses: they fit well on my DIY Silent Mini Keyboards and also work well on paper printed of the staff (such as this one by Susan Paradis, which is pictured in the second photo below).
I got the inspiration for these Musical AlphaGems from those little magnets that have been so popular over the last couple of years (see this blog article). Continue reading “DIY: Musical AlphaGems”
I recently decided that I wanted to own a set of silent keyboards for doing introductory piano activities with young children, and for using during group theory activities. Unfortunately, buying a set of silent plastic keyboards (view them at musicinmotion.com) can be a rather large studio expense. Of course, a cheap alternative would be to simply print a picture of a keyboard on paper. But there is something nice about the 3D features of a silent keyboard…so I decided to make my own. I got the idea from Anne Cosby Gaudet’s Piano Discoveries website, where she made similar keyboards with wood and foam.
My DIY (Do It Yourself) mini keyboards do not have true-to-life sized keys as the store-bought plastic silent keyboards have. However, I spent less on the supplies for making a set of six keyboards than it would have cost me to buy just one plastic silent keyboard! Here’s how I made my set of six keyboards:
A continuation of the previous post……see Part 1 here.
THEORY & IMPROVISATION: THE PB&J OF MUSIC ~ by Martha Hilley
Activities Continued…..
5. Progression Based Improvisation
1) Show the student a progression such as:
A | D | A | Bmin | E | A | E | A ||
2) Be sure the students thinks about the relationship between the chords. Spell each chord together before playing. Check how many chord tones are in common between each chord, and play the best inversion of the triads accordingly for good voice leading.
Side note: this activity is great to do with groups of students, away from the piano. Try “playing” this progression moving to the closet inversions on your invisible lap piano. =) Continue reading “2010 MMTA Conference (2): Theory & Improv as the PB&J of Music, Part 2”
What follows are the notes I took from a session with Martha Hilley at the 2010 Michigan Music Teachers Association conference. She shared with us a number of activities that can be incorporated in a variety of settings, whether it be the private lesson, class piano, or monthly group lessons (my summary is posted here with permission).
THEORY & IMPROVISATION: THE PB&J OF MUSIC ~ by Martha Hilley
Introduction
Do you have your students improvise? Do you improvise? The biggest reason teachers don’t improvise during the lesson with their students is the giant time factor: we often don’t want to take the time out of the lesson. However, improvisation can be very effective even with beginners.
Activities:
1. Black Key Improvisation
Use improvisation even with young beginner students. They often can play rhythms that they can’t yet read, so use improvisation as a way to teach rhythm and technique. It frees them from the score. Black key improvisation is especially great because there are no wrong notes!
1) Ask student to put 5 fingers on 5 black keys (any 5).
2) Teacher sets up an ostinato. Student is instructed first to listen to the ostinato, and then play (immediately after, joining the teacher). Continue reading “2010 MMTA Conference (1): Theory & Improv as the PB&J of Music, Part 1”
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