I’m thinking of starting a new weekly post idea…throughout the week I’ll take pictures of various activities and lessons in my studio and then on Friday I’ll put up a post with a couple of favorite pictures. What do you think?

Since I’m leaving tonight for our annual state music teachers conference, I’ll post this week’s pictures today:

Naomi has been working on learning the different kinds of 7th chords (half diminished, fully diminished, minor, major, and dominant) and is still a little fuzzy on some of them. We thought that doing a fun chord-building activity with scale blocks might be fun!

I just called out the name of the chord and then she had to build it. Easy, but fun.

For one of his Mastery Challenges this week, Graham chose to work on identifying the treble clef ledger line notes. I started by having him line up all the ledger line flashcards in order on the music rack.

After he got them all lined up, we played a game where I used my conductor’s baton to point to one of the cards and then he had to play it. After we did several practice run-throughs, I timed him to see if he could get it in under 1 minute. He blasted through them and pulled it off in 52 seconds! He was a bit slower when I put them all back in a stack and had him run through them without being able to associate them with their placement in the line-up, but he’s much better than he was when he walked into his lesson!