Joey has made huge strides in his understanding and execution of scales this year, so I thought I would put him to the test with this fun Scale Scramble game. I placed all the scale blocks that corresponded to a particular scale on the fall board and then timed him to see how fast he could arrange them into the correct scale. It was a bit of a challenge at first, but we did several and he got pretty fast at it!

Luke is the acclaimed comedian in the studio. He has been known to give a gut-busting performance routine and I never quite know what to expect from him… I had seen him the night before his lesson at an event and we were discussing possible character descriptions for him in a drama role with another organization I work with. He said he would like to play a nervous, fidgety, quirky, sort of character and I asked him what that would look like. So, the next day he showed up for his lesson as “Herman” and I got a very good visual representation of such a character. He was hilarious and of course I had to take a picture!

I’ve been brainstorming different game ideas using flashcards and told Caleb I wanted to try one out on him. I started by giving him the treble clef C, D, and E. Then I played various patterns using those three notes and he had to arrange them in the correct order. He aced those, so we quickly moved on to 5-note patterns. The 5-note patterns usually took a couple of play-throughs, but he eventually got all but one of them correct. It turned out to be pretty fun and a great way to work on melodic dictation.

True to our agreement last week, I got to choose the game this week at the end of James’ lesson. I chose a variation of Whack-it!. I placed all the treble clef notes from middle C to high F on the floor and set the timer for one minute. As I called out note names, James had to whack the corresponding card. If he was correct, I took the card away and called out a new note name. If he was wrong, I placed a previously-removed card back in front of him. The goal was to collect as many cards as possible before the time ran out. Once we finished the treble clef, I took my turn with him calling the notes and then we repeated the game with bass clef notes from middle C down to low G. I pretty much creamed him - even with him implementing various stalling tactics when he was calling the note names. So he insisted that next week he gets to choose the game again.