Looking for a fun game to play with a group of students that will also help them work on note identification? Try having a spelling bee! Here’s how it works:

1. Divide the students into two or more groups.
2. Give each group a set of flashcards with notes on the staff (make sure the answer isn’t on the back! Click on these links for a perfectly suited set you can print and use: Page One, Page Two, Page Three. These are a wonderful creation designed by Flo of Pianimals.)
3. Directions to students: when a word is called from the list, they must arrange the flashcards in the correct order to spell the word and stand facing you so that you can “read” the word from left to right. Once they are arranged in the correct order, they must ding a bell or give some other signal to indicate that they are done.
4. Call out one of the words. (Below is a list of words that can be spelled using only the letters in the musical alphabet.)
5. Each team that arranges the notes correctly gets one point. The team to spell the word first gets one additional point. The team with the most points at the end wins!
6. Have fun!

Musical Alphabet Words
(click here to download a printable version of this list.)

A

ace

adage

age

aged

B

babe

bad

bade

badge

bag

baggage

bead

bed

bee

beef

beg

C

cab

cabbage

cad

cafe

cage

D

dab

dabbed

dad

dead

deaf

decade

E

edge

egg

F

façade

face

fad

fade

fed

feed

G

gab

gag

gage

Choosing Music Games for Students to Play
Written by Karen Koch of Music Educator’s Marketplace

In order not to be overwhelmed by the many games that are available, you may need to think through what you wish to accomplish by using games. Here are some questions I ask to help shoppers at conference exhibits, along with some of the specific games that I know of:

* Are you looking for something to be the centerpiece of a group lesson? Try MUSOPOLY or another game that takes some time to play. FORWARD MARCH is also great!

* Are you looking for a waiting area activity or a self-correcting lab activity away from the computer? Consider a Music Jigsaw Puzzle, MUSICOLORIDE Game, MUSIC MATH CARDS, MUSIC SCALE CARDS, or composer coloring books.

* Do you want to improve some specific aspect of musical understanding, such as note-reading, maintaining a steady pulse, recognizing intervals, recognizing key signatures, knowing musical terms, etc.? We have just added a bunch of terrific new games from Whirligig that focus on one concept at a time, i.e. intervals, notes, rhythms, key signatures. We also have other games that are fun, but not new.

* Do you want competition or prefer the harmony of group music-making or rhythm ensembles?

* Do you have space for active games, or need something quieter? Many of the TCW games are active, fun, and noisy! Requiring less space are bingo games, rhythm ensembles (these Clap and Count Cards are great for rhythm ensembles too!), flash card games, and teacher-made ear training activities (show a notated musical phrase and ask students to identify something they hear you play that is not in the notation, such as a changed rhythm or interval).

I just hosted two days of a Music Games Fair for my students who don’t take regular lessons in the summer, but work on sight-reading, music history, and other summer projects. We had great fun playing games and selecting library music for their summer enjoyment. The right games are motivating, educational, entertaining, and encourage the development of musical friendships, whether between teacher and student, or among groups of students. My teaching would be much poorer without games!

A note from Natalie: What excellent advice from Karen! I encourage you to visit the Music Educator’s Marketplace to expore some of these games for yourself. Even better, though, bring the store to you! They offer an innovative MEM Store-In-A-Box. Organize a Music Games workshop for your local music teachers association, or, if you don’t have one, invite some music teaching colleagues over and explore the games together. What a fun idea! I’m hoping to try this out with our local association this fall, so I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Since I’ll be taking off of teaching next week to attend the MTNA Conference, I planned to stick to my regular teaching schedule this week, even though it was spring break for most of my students. I had consented to giving a few lessons Monday morning for several students that would be going out of town. Sunday night, a group of six of my students who are good friends came up with the idea of me giving them a special group class Monday morning instead. It sounded like a fun alternative to me, so I agreed. They all showed up Monday morning at 10:00 and for an hour and a half we all had a blast!

We started out with a fast-paced game of Affirm-a-Term. On each card is a music-related word of some sort. The student whose turn it is has to describe the word so that the other students can guess what it is. I gave each student a one minute time limit to go through as many cards as they could. We went around the circle two times and each student kept track of how many cards they had gone through during their turn. They had a ton of fun with this and I’m sure they would have played it the whole time if I had let them.

I pulled a fun-looking piano trio of “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” from my files Sunday night and assigned two students to each part. We started out by all counting out loud together and them tapping the assigned parts while I directed. After a couple times through, they worked in pairs on their assigned part. (Thankfully, since we’re getting ready for the Clavinova Festival right now, I have a Clavinova in my studio that we could use!)

Once the parts seemed to be coming together pretty well for all of them, we split into the trio at each piano and worked on playing the whole piece through. They did an amazing job! It worked really well to have two people playing each part (one at each piano), because if one of them messed up, the other one was doing fine and the other could pick back up with them. They learned to listen better to the other players in the ensemble, they were able to bring out the melody when it was in their part (this trio was perfect because each part had the melody at some point), and they were all willingly counting out loud in order to stay together!

The countdown is nearing its end - the MTNA Conference will begin in only a couple of days! I opted not to participate in either of the special Saturday sessions this year, but I plan to attend the opening keynote address by Van Cliburn on Saturday evening. I copied the Daily Schedule from the MTNA Conference page and have been scrutinizing the 30 pages on my computer screen, trying to determine which sessions I want to attend. I’m glad that there are so many fabulous options, but it sure does make for some difficult decisions!

Here are some of the sessions that look especially interesting to me:

1. TCW Resources: How to Make Music Lessons the Highlight of Your Students’ Week
Come see innovative games and materials to liven up and organize your studio. Compete for prizes in this energetic workshop! You’ll be amazed at the fun you and your students are missing!

2. Recharge Your Studio: Fresh Ideas to Jump-Start Group Teaching
This session will present new ideas in a variety of group teaching formats including games, performance practice, music appreciation and music theory. Video clips and live demonstrations will be used to illustrate each segment.

3. FJH Music Company: Balancing Your Students’ Repertoire Portfolio for Success in the Studio
Helen Marlais and Kevin Olson will present the tools and the materials for selecting repertoire. The session will introduce Marlais’s new series The Festival Collection. Olson and Marlais will also present their new Sight Reading & Rhythm Every Day series.

4. What Students are Doing When You are Not Looking: Evaluation of Effectiveness in Student Practice
This session will explore what students do in their personal practice session. It will focus on how effectively students use the practice tools they’re given and how teachers might help students make better decisions.

5. A Conceptual Approach to Memorizing and Improvising
Transform a student’s memory by an engaging process that utilizes improvisation at each of four memorization steps. Patterns and analysis come alive! View student demos and try out the process that develops aural, analytic and motor memories.

6. Who’s in Charge Here: The Left Brain, the Right Brain and Making Music
Different aspects of musical skill reside in each brain hemisphere. Each of us has a dominant hemisphere. What does this mean for the study of music? How do we integrate the two hemispheres to become better musicians?

7. Podcasting: A New Way to Put Lessons, Performances and Lectures into the Ears of a Worldwide, Mobile Audience
Podcasting offers educators and students opportunities to be heard by their peers and by audiences around the world. Learn how to host your own podcast and give your students and their performances global exposure.

There are plenty more great looking sessions, so I know I won’t be able to attend everything that looks appealing…but I plan to post notes from each of the sessions I attend, so check back throughout the conference for more details and little nuggets of teaching wisdom!

Also, if any of you are attending the conference and would be interested in writing a review of the sessions you attend to be included here on Music Matters Blog, just send me an e-mail and let me know. I’m sure those who are unable to attend would enjoy reading some of the highlights from the conference.

Here’s a fun worksheet I used to start off this group class celebrating Mozart’s birthday:

Click here or on the above image to download the worksheet.

It’s a fun ice-breaker sort of activity, as it helps the students start working together as a team and share ideas with each other. Each team designates one writer and then the whole team contributes to come up with as many words as they can that fit the number of syllables indicated by the rhythm and the word example at the top of each column. I awarded 10 points for each column to the team that had the most words in that column.

In celebration of the 250th birthday of Mozart this year, I held a special birthday party at my February group class. The only catch was that I didn’t tell the students whose birthday we were celebrating. Throughout the course of the evening, they collected clues and at the end had to figure out whose birthday it was. You can view several pictures from the class here on my website. Here’s how it worked:

I split the group of 14 students into two teams. Throughout the class, we alternated between a variety of games and worksheets that the students had to complete. For each team that finished first or gave a correct answer (depending on the activity), they received a specified number of points. Once they had accumulated 25 points, they received a clue about the person whose birthday we were celebrating. Here’s where we kept track of the points:

I listed the specific games and worksheets that we used, but the same format could be followed with any games and worksheets of your choosing. I’ll be posting some of these specific games and worksheets in following posts.

Here are the clues that each team could collect as they accumulated the necessary points:

1. Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophillus were all part of this composer’s given name. All of these given names mean the same thing –“Beloved of God.”

2. He was born and died in the same country, located in Europe. He was 35 years old when he died.

3. Although he lived a rather short life, he composed over 600 works, including more than 50 symphonies, 25 piano concertos, 12 violin concertos, 27 concert arias, 26 string quartets, 15 Masses, and 21 opera works.

4. His father was an accomplished musician and composer and taught both his son and daughter how to play the pianoforte.

5. He composed his first minuet at the age of 5 and his first symphony at the age of 8.

6. Because of his constant travels as a renowned musician, he eventually learned to speak 15 different languages.

7. One of his compositions was a set of variations on the popular French folk tune, Ah, vous dirai-je, Mama – known today as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

8. He died while composing music especially requested for a Requiem (a kind of music that choirs perform at funerals). As he grew increasingly ill while composing, he eventually became convinced that he was composing the music for his own funeral.

9. When he was just a boy, he traveled to Rome during Holy Week. He heard the Pope’s choir sing, Miserere. It could not be heard anywhere else, because no other choir was allowed to sing it. It had never been printed, and nobody outside the choir had ever seen the music, which was kept carefully guarded. When he went to bed that night, the music kept playing over and over in his head so that he could not get to sleep. So, he got up, pulled out his paper and, by the light of the moon, wrote out every note of Miserere.

10. He loved the music from Turkey, and composed a special piece – a Rondo – to sound like the music played in that country.

At the end of the evening, each team had to use whatever clues they had received and the resources I provided (several general music encyclopedias and books on composers) to determine whose birthday we were celebrating. If the team turned in the correct answer, each person on the team got to enter their name in a drawing for a CD by that composer. Both teams had a lot of fun, worked together very well and even came up with the correct answer! This fun, non-stop activity format could be used to celebrate the birthday of any composer - provided you use different clues, of course!

Every music teacher needs a white board. My students love writing messages on my white board. Here’s one that showed up today:

“I want stay in your lessons till a’m 35 years old”

This particular white board is one I picked up at a local teacher supply store. It’s magnetic, 24×36″ and has a grid with 1″ squares on it. An on-line search turned up a Magic Wall Reversible Magnetic Poster. It’s not quite as big (18×24″), but looks the same otherwise.

What an incredibly handy studio “prop” this has been - for uses other than just writing messages! It’s a step away from the piano and is perfect for having students write out clefs, scales, key signatures and more. I’ve also used it for rhythmic dictation. I play a rhythm at the piano and the student arranges the magnetic notes on the board to accurately reflect the rhythm I played.

And of course, it’s just fun! Kids love white boards and magnets…and so do I!

Ten students gathered at the studio last Thursday night for our second group class of the semester. With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, it seemed like the perfect theme for this event. We began by discussing how Thanksgiving (defined as “giving thanks”) and music are linked. I read Psalm 137 as a perfect example of how the psalmist exemplifies giving thanks to God through song. This easily segued into a history of the first Thanksgiving Feast where the Pilgrims were giving thanks to God for enabling their survival, due very much to the Indians and their willingness to teach them how to provide food for themselves.

I told the students that I had a feast prepared for them, but just like the Pilgrims, it would require some hard work. They would have to do some fishing and some shooting and would have to learn how to work together and help each other. One of my objectives was for the students to play an ensemble together. I selected the We Three Kings ensemble from A Christmas Gathering by Lynn Freeman Olson. (Please note, after conducting an on-line search, I found that this book is no longer in print. The website linked here is the only one I found that carries this great ensemble book.) I copied the pages and then cut it into two measure segments. The students would have to collect all the segments and piece them together before being able to play it!

The students were split into two groups. One group started out at the shooting range. Turkeys were strung up all along the wall (click here to download the file with these turkeys):

The students had to stand behind a designated line and shoot these nerf darts at the turkeys:

If they shot a turkey, they could take it off the line and see if it had a folded paper paper-clipped to the back side. If so, they had to open the paper (one of the two-measure segments from the ensemble) and follow the directions written on the front of the turkey - either “play the notes,” “say the notes,” or “say the intervals.” Here, one student plays the notes from his paper:

Meanwhile, the other group had baited their hook and was trying to catch a “big one”! I used a thick dowel rod, some twine and a small magnet to make the fishing rod and line.

The students were trying to “catch” these segments of the ensemble that could be hooked when the magnet attached itself to the paper clip on each segment.

There were, of course, blank pieces of paper included in the mix so that not every “fish” was a keeper!
About half way through, the groups switched places and tried their hand at the other challenge. The students found it surprisingly difficult to catch the fish and shoot the turkeys (considering their teacher wowed them by hitting a turkey dead-on when I demonstrated for them how to do it…okay, I confess…so I had been practicing before they arrived… :-D), but they had a blast doing it!

Once all the ensemble segments had been collected, it was time to start assembling them in the correct order:

This, too, proved to be quite the challenge, but working together they were eventually able to complete it:

The parts were quickly divied out and the students were ready…let the music begin!

I conducted, all the students counted, and they all followed their parts amazingly well (or at least faked it well!) and stayed on beat through the entire piece. I would have loved to spend more time doing this, but the promised feast was awaiting!

A scrumptious feast of popcorn, pretzels, corn tortilla chips, grapes and lemonade turned out to be a hit!

As we feasted, each student took their turn sharing one performance tip that has helped them and then performing a prepared piece for the rest of the group:

At the end of the class, I sent home a paper with the Thanksgiving story and a corresponding quiz that I adapted from this website that could be brought back to their next lesson to earn an extra dollar.

This Thanksgiving group class turned out to be lots of fun and a jam-packed hour and a half!

One of my objectives this summer in my piano camp for elementary students was to build better reading skills. In addition to other activities, I decided to try this different approach to note identification and intervallic playing. I emphasized using Cs as landmark notes and then playing intervals from those landmarks. (This is not geared toward developing fluent sight-reading skills as much as it is just to note identification and interval application.)

We covered one interval at a time. The student would open up to the appropriate page in their Piano Camp workbook and would begin by writing in the names of each note. Once completed, the students were paired and sent to the piano or keyboard to play the patterns for each other. One played while the other observed and checked for accuracy. Since doing this, several of the students have a much more solid understanding of notation and can much more readily identify and play the correct notes.

Here are the different worksheets that I developed for this purpose:

Click here to download Across the C’s.

Click here to download Just a 2nd.

Click here to download 3rd Time’s the Charm.

Click here to download Go 4th and Play!

Click here to download The 5th Has It!

Click here to download 6th Sense.

Click here to download 7th Inning Stretch.

Click here to download Crazy 8ths!

Here’s a fun “get-to-know-you” game I’ve used at numerous group classes. I just change the statements in the boxes based on the makeup of the group.

In each box is a statement with a line below it. When the signal is given, the students must find others who can sign their name in a box, indicating that the statement is true of them. The number of times any one person can sign another’s sheet is limited by the number of total players there are. The first person to turn in a completed paper wins!

Click here to download a pdf file of the above pictured game sheet.

Click here to download a MS Word document that you can adapt to include statements of your choice in each box.