In September of last year I made several sets of scale blocks. I’ve been using them periodically during lessons, but I decided to make more of a concerted effort to use them as a teaching and reinforcement tool with my students. Joey just finished learning all of his major scales, thanks to the aid and motivation of the scale chart in the front of his assignment book. Before we move on to the minor scales I told him that I want him to be able to immediately recall how many sharps or flats each key has and what they are. For example, I would say, “A Major” and he would reply, “3 sharps - F#,C#,G#.” I decided that step one toward that goal would be memorizing the order of sharps and flats. Enter: scale blocks!

After discussing how to figure out the pattern initially, Joey arranged the blocks in the correct order. I timed him and it took 25 seconds. I gave him 2 more chances to beat his time and he decreased it substantially each time, with a final time of 7 seconds. Next week at his lesson he’s going to see if he can beat that record! We repeated the same process with the flats. Part of his assignment this week is to write the complete order out on the staff in his manuscript book each day of the week in both bass and treble clef while saying their names out loud.

We both had fun and decided that using scale blocks is a great way to memorize the order of sharps and flats!

I’m going to continue trying to squeeze out my creative juices to come up with other fun ways to use the scale blocks. Does anyone else have any ideas they’d be willing to share?

Inspired by this Bag O’ Blocks and several others like it that I’ve seen, I decided to try making my own scale blocks. I could have just bought this wonderful set from Music Educator’s Marketplace, but I wanted to have several octave sets and couldn’t afford to buy more than one.

So, I began my creative endeavor with the following supplies:

60 one-inch wooden blocks, matte finish craft paint, 4 one-inch paint sponges, small paint brush, a can of clear acrylic sealer (also matte finish)

Step 1:

Make sure I know what I’m doing. I drew up this little diagram so that I would know which blocks needed to be painted white-black-white-black and which ones needed to be painted white-white-white-black.

Step 2:

Start painting! I painted white first that way if there was overlap, the black would cover it up.

Step 4:

Keep painting! Since there were two sides that didn’t need key names, I decided to paint them in my studio colors: red and yellow. The longest part of this project was painting all the key names. It would have probably worked (and definitely been faster!) to use a paint pen, rather than a brush, but I didn’t have any on hand and didn’t feel like making a run to the store.

Step 5:

The paint dried very fast, so as soon as I finished the last key name I took them outside and sprayed them with the acrylic sealer. I left them out to dry for about 10 minutes, then turned them over and sprayed the other side. After about another 10-15 minutes, they were done. (I definitely advise using a sealer. It was amazing how much better the blocks looked and felt after they were sprayed with it. I can tell they will last longer this way!)

Step 6:

Bag them up, with two complete octaves per set, and think of lots of ways to use them! I’ve already used the scale blocks at least 5 times this week and hope to post some specific ideas in the future. They are such a blast!