Category Archives: Scale Blocks

Another Key Signature Game

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This sister duo is always begging to play a game if we have time at the end of their lesson, and I usually try to accommodate them! This week, the younger one was working on all her Major flat key arpeggios and memorizing the corresponding key signatures, so I decided to play a related game.

I gave each of them a set of scale blocks (+an extra “C” block). Then I lined up the flat key signature flash cards and had them line up their blocks according. Once they understood the pattern, I had them scramble their blocks and race to see who could get them put back in the correct order the fastest. When they both were getting this figured out without any problem, I decided to increase the challenge; I scrambled the key signature flashcards and then they had to rearrange their scale blocks in the corresponding order. This proved to be a bit more of a challenge, but was incredibly helpful in determining how well they really knew which key signature was which.

This is one of the benefits of having lots of ready-made tools (like scale blocks and flashcards) at your fingertips. You can spontaneously come up with games and activities that reinforce specific concepts that relate to what the student is studying that week. Plus, I tend to think this is a more fun and effective way to learn and reinforce concepts than filling out worksheets/theory books anyway.

Time for Some Pictures!

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It’s looking a little dull around here these days, so I thought it was about time for a picture post! Here are a couple things that have been going on in my studio recently…

Do you use the penny practice game? I have a jar of pennies sitting on my desk and my students frequently ask if they can play the penny game when we are spot practicing a difficult section in one of their pieces. The student just decides how many pennies they’d like to use. All the pennies they select are placed on the left side of the piano music rack. If they play the difficult spot perfectly, they get to move a penny to the other side. If they mess up, all the pennies on the right have to be moved back to the left. The goal is to get all of the pennies moved over to the right side. If they are successful, I let them keep the pennies. You wouldn’t believe how excited some of them get about taking home 8 cents! :-) James, above, especially loves this game – and it’s perfect for him because he’s one of those start-at-the-beginning-and-play-the-whole-thing-again-if-he-makes-a-mistake students.

Earlier this month twelve of my students participated in one of our favorite activities of the year – The Clavinova Festival (nine of the ones pictured above are my students – the other three were in a different recital)! As a part of the festival, all the students get their name entered in a drawing for their own Clavinova. I practically squealed into the phone when Johnny called me to tell me that he won the Clavinova this year! Amazingly, that makes four students from my studio who have won a Clavinova over the years. (And one of them is sitting in my studio, because the student who won it gave it to me as a birthday present that year!)

For his mastery challenge last week, Andrew was working on memorizing the Major Sharp key signatures. Since he’s still a little young to fully grasp the concept, I tried this approach with him. I mixed up all the key signature flashcards and then had him arrange them in order from the least sharps to the most sharps. He knew that the key signature with none was C-Major, so we put the C scale block in front of that flashcard. Then I had him hold up his right hand and figure out the fifth note above C by saying the notes followin C in the alphabet to see which note corresponded to his pinky finger. It was G, so the G scale block got placed in front of the G-Major key signature. And so on. He loved doing this and was ecstatic when he conquered the challenge by getting everything unscrambled and lined up in the correct order in less than 30 seconds! What a diligent little student!

This Week in Photos

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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:
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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!

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

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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.

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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!

Memorizing the Order of Sharps and Flats with Scale Blocks

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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?

Make Your Own Scale Blocks

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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!