As long as I’m thinking about Piano Camp stuff, I thought I would run a special for anyone interested in purchasing the Lesson Plans for a fun week of Piano Camp! This is the one that I put together for last summer and my students and I had a great time! See lots of pictures here, here, here, here, and here. So, for the special…If you purchase the Lesson Plans by the end of January, I’ll send you a free 26-page student workbook that I compiled to go along with the outline for the week. Just go to the Resources Page and purchase the Piano Camp Lesson Plans. As soon as your order comes through, I’ll send the student workbook your way!

Also, for anyone who purchased the lesson plans last year during the promotion and received the student workbook, I’ve updated the cover for this year. If you want the updated cover, just send me an e-mail and I’ll send you the 2010 version.

Is anyone else starting to think about summer Piano Camp plans yet? Do you have any specific themes or ideas in mind? I’m tossing around the idea of maybe doing a theme with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I would pattern it similar to the Carnival of the Animals Piano Camp that I did several years ago. Ooh…actually, I just stumbled across a press release from last fall announcing that there is a new book in the Get to Know Classical Masterpieces Series, published by Schott, based on Handel’s Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Now that sounds like a good possibility, too. Ack! And they have Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons! Now I’m really torn!

Any of these would make a good theme, I think. Maybe I should take a poll! What would you choose? I’ve embedded a poll in this post, so you can give me some input!

Today is the last day to receive a free 26-page Piano Camp Student Workbook with your purchase of the Piano Camp lesson plans that I used in my studio this year. (See lots of pictures here, here, here, here, and here!) Just wanted to remind you in case you were planning to order, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet!

Piano Camp Lesson Plans
This is the daily outline for our week-long piano camp, with lots of hyperlinks to correlating resources and websites. If you’re interested in planning a fun, memorable Piano Camp for your own studio, this will give you the information and tools you need. The outline is succinct and easy-to-follow. It can be implemented “as-is” or adapted to incorporate your own ideas.

To make this even easier to implement, I’ve decided to offer a special deal: if you purchase this outline by the end of July, I’ll also send you for free the 26-page student workbook that I’ve already compiled from the resource links outlined in the lesson plan! Just place your order, and as soon as I receive the notice, I’ll send the workbook file your way!

Piano Camp Lesson Plans

Shop the Music Matters Blog Store for other fun practice incentives and workbooks.

For our final day of Piano Camp, I decided to switch things up just a little and play a game to start off the lesson.

Since we were focusing on relative keys today, I printed off a copy of my Major Minor Scale Matchup Worksheet on cardstock and then cut it into rectangles with one scale per piece. I distributed the pieces to the students and had them write the scale names, using the patterns from the previous two days to determine if a scale was Major or minor.

Once all the scale names were written, we mixed up the cards and then layed them out for a fun (and long!) game of memory.

Also, today I had each of the ensemble groups perform their piece for the rest of us. For one week’s worth of practice, I think they all did a pretty good job. And I think each of the groups are planning to keep polishing up their pieces so that they can play them at our September Surprise kickoff event. Here are video clips so you can watch each of the performances:

Noelle and Luke play Important Questions, from Simply Silly Duets by Kevin and Julia Olson. Even though Luke still has trouble with music notation, he loved this piece and really got into the feel of it!

Naomi and Isabella play Smile, Op. 280, No. 1 by Ernesto Becucci, from Easy Classical Piano Duets for Teacher and Student, Book 3.

Joey, Graham, and Ryan did a super job working together on Camptown Races, Arr, by Carrie Kraft. But I think they had the most fun planning and rehearsing their special surprise ending!

Next up, I’m planning to post a Piano Camp 2009 Resource list with quick links to all the resources I used to plan this year’s camp…

We just finished our third morning of Piano Camp. Hard to believe we only have one day left! One of our daily activities is a Composer Spotlight. I wanted to highlight some of the lesser known composers, and also incorporate aspects of how they used their music to glorify God. I already had on my shelves the perfect book to accomplish this dual purpose: Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers by Patrick Cavanaugh. So, for about 15-20 minutes at the end of our time, I read the story of one of the composers while the students color the picture of that composer in their workbooks.

I selected Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, and Ives as our composers for the week. Several of the coloring pages came from this page of the Making Music Fun website. For the ones I couldn’t find, I used detailed portraits and then had my sister convert them into coloring pages using her design software.

Here, Luke and Graham display their colored pictures of Haydn. (I found out how much my students love coloring when I did a Carnival of the Animals Piano Camp two years ago.) After I finish reading the story, I play one of the corresponding radio broadcasts from the Classics for Kids show. I also included the correlating activity sheets produced by Classics for Kids in each of the workbooks. They can work on these if there is any extra time after they’ve finished coloring, or they can do them on their own after Piano Camp is over.

To be continued…

Continuing with the Piano Camp theme for the week, here are a few pictures from another one of our daily activities – ensemble playing! I played through a whole stack of ensemble repertoire last week looking for the perfect combinations for the group of students attending Piano Camp this week. We allocoate about 15-20 minutes each day to learn and rehearse their pieces. I make the rounds between each group, but for the most part just let them work on their own. This is always really motivating for them. They work hard to get their pieces down by the end of the week – an exciting accomplishment, to be sure!

Naomi and Isabella are loving this lively duet: Smile, Op. 280, No. 1 by Ernesto Becucci, from Easy Classical Piano Duets for Teacher and Student, Book 3.

These three boys are quite the trio! They all have strong personalities, so it’s definitely a challenge for them to work together, but they are doing a fantastic job! Their trio is part of the Keyboard Ensemble Series: Camptown Races, Arr, by Carrie Kraft.

I paired Noelle with Luke because I knew she’d be willing to help him figure out his notes and rhythms, and because she could easily learn and play the teacher accompaniment. They are playing the really cool-sounding Important Questions, from Simply Silly Duets by Kevin and Julia Olson.

To be continued…

One of the other activities we are doing each day of Piano Camp is improvising. I start out by having all the students play the pentascale, chord progression, and arpeggio of a given key. We do this several times all together. Then, I play an accompaniment CD and they play along with the CD.

After one run-through, I let them choose what order they want to play the various elements in (scale, arpeggio, etc.) as long as they stay on beat and try to match the style and character of the accompaniment. I conduct while they play and give them a signal leading into the final measure so that we all end together.

I have a couple of students at the piano, a couple at one keyboard, one at another keyboard, one on the bells, and one on the xylophone. After a couple times through, they all switch to a different instrument, and those on the keyboards can select another orchestral instrument for their sound setting. (The ones on the xylophone and bells just play the chord root or the chord shell during the chord progressions.)

By Thursday and Friday, I should be able to let them do a full-fledged improvisation in the key, but for now it helps to give them some structure within which to play. Either way it’s a lot of fun and sounds pretty cool!

To be continued…

Since I’m holding Piano Camp this week, I thought I’d give you a look into what we do each day. You can see the outline of my objectives for the week on the post Working on Piano Camp Lesson Plans. Not surprisingly, some of the activities took a little longer than I anticipated, so we didn’t get to everything that I had planned. We couldn’t believe how fast the time flew by! I’ll try to post pictures from several of our activities each day. Here are a few from today:

Here’s a snapshot of the workbooks I put together for each student. Once all the pages were printed, I three-hole punched them and then fastened them in these colorful folders. We’ll be working out of these each day, and then the students will be allowed to take them home at the end of the week to complete additional worksheets and activities that we have to skip or leave incomplete due to time constraints.

The first activity today was the assignment for each student to draw a diagram of the piano keyboard – as accurately as they could based on their memory/knowledge of how many keys, etc. This was a good intro into discussing what keyboard topography is and why it’s important. We also discussed the history and design of the piano in more detail.

Our next activity is what I called “The Blindfold Challenge.” Each student took his/her turn sitting at the piano with the blindfold and had to play groups of either two black keys or three black keys up and down the keyboard. The goal was to be as smooth and accurate as possible. This was a challenge, but they all did a great job coming up with various strategies to help with accuracy and fluidity!

To be continued…

My Piano Camp is scheduled for next week, so I’ve been busy these last couple of days trying to assimilate all my ideas and devise the accompanying lesson plans. For more specifics on how I do this, you can read the post, How to Plan a Group Class. This year, I’m only holding one Piano Camp, which is nice because then it only requires one set of lesson plans! It’s a pretty diverse age and skill-level group, so I’ve had to brainstorm extra hard to think of objectives and activities that will be relevant and exciting for all of the students. I still need to finalize my outline and finish designing the student workbooks this weekend, but here are the objectives that I’ve outlined for the group:

• Have fun!
• Develop keyboard topography skills
• Learn about the history and design of the piano
• Learn an ensemble piece (assign each student a duet or trio)
• Build improvisation skills
• Learn about some composers and their spiritual lives

My tendency is to try to focus on too many things, so I’m trying to be more realistic and narrow in my emphasis. Each of the activities are designed to reinforce these objectives and hopefully provide a cohesive flow throughout the course of the week. It should be a lot of fun and a great learning experience for all of us!

Are any of you holding piano camps this summer?