Have you ever wished you could just whip up a quick worksheet to use with one of your students that would address a particular concept? Joy, of the Color in My Piano blog, has put together a wonderful guide to using music fonts to create your own music worksheets! Like Joy, I use Finale to create and export graphics into worksheets, but I have rarely used music fonts for this purpose. I am thrilled to have this handy step-by-step guide and will definitely be referring back to it often!
Category Archives: Worksheets
Rhythm Ensemble Activity – Free Download
One of the other activities at our Travel Tour last Thursday night was a Rhythm Ensemble. This was our first activity of the evening, so as students arrived I let them look through the stack of seven parts and select the one that they felt most confident being able to accurately play. Each of the parts progresses in difficulty, and the rhythmic elements of each part correlate with the requirements of our state Music Progressions curriculum.
Once all the students had arrived, I distributed a selection of rhythm instruments and we all had fun playing the various parts together. Those who didn’t get an instrument snapped the pulse with me while the others played. We traded around instruments so that everyone got a chance to be a part of the rhythm ensemble. It was a simple, fun, musical way to start the class! Feel free to download and print the Rhythm Ensemble parts for use in your studio!
Monday Mailbag – Making Custom Student Worksheets
What program do you use to create your worksheets and publications?
It may shock (or horrify!) some of you better designer-types to know this, but I create almost all of my worksheets and practice incentive materials in Microsoft Word. I’ve discovered that with the use of tables, you can accomplish just about anything in Word. That said, I do use a few other programs for other related purposes.
For more graphic intensive design work I use either Fireworks or Print Shop. There are probably some much better options out there, but I started using Print Shop when I was ten years old and am so familiar with it that it has remained my go-to software for design work. It’s a low-end program, inexpensive to purchase, and very intuitive. I started using Fireworks when I got into web design and have gotten comfortable enough with it that I often use it for print design work as well.
Whenever I’m creating worksheets that use portions of a musical staff/musical examples, I create the excerpts in Finale (when I bought Finale several years ago, I did a ton of research and the best price I found for it was the academic version at aabaca.com – I definitely recommend getting it there!) and then export them over to Microsoft Word. It’s amazing the things you can accomplish with most programs if you spend enough time scouring the help menus, searching the forums, and learning how to trick it into doing what you want. 
Remember, if you have a question you’d like to contribute to next week’s Monday Mailbag, leave it in the comments below or send me an e-mail sometime this week with Monday Mailbag in the subject line!
Practice Survey – Free Downloadable Form!
Last week as I was doing my Bible study one morning, I was especially struck by some verses in Isaiah 26: 9b-10:
“For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the Lord.”
These verses made me start thinking about the principle of cause and effect and the importance of experiencing consequences for bad choices. This, in turn, made me think of the students in my studio who often fail to practice consistently (yes, I have some of those, too!). If a student doesn’t practice diligently in a given week, what is the most effective way for me to respond? If I’m just as pleasant as usual and let them “get away” with a typical lesson or some other fun activity, what does that teach them? That there are no felt consequences for not practicing. Of course, we know that the most serious consequence of not practicing is that the student will not progress as quickly or to as high a level as a student who does practice consistently. But this is hard for students to grasp because they can’t know the extent of the potential they are failing to develop through their lack of practice.
So, I’ve been pondering these thoughts and wondering if my responsibility as a teacher should include some sort of felt consequence for students who don’t practice. And in my ponderings, I began wondering what the #1 factor is that keeps students from practicing consistently. I came up with a variety of possibilities, but finally decided that my best bet was to get input directly from the students. With that in mind, I devised a Practice Survey that I’ve been having each of my students complete – both the practicers and the non-practicers. I thought as long as I was getting feedback, I should find out from the good practicers what it is that motivates them to practice!
The Practice Survey includes two questions:
- What is the #1 reason you don’t practice consistently (5-6 days per week)?
- What is the #1 reason you practice consistently (5-6 days per week)?
Each of the questions is followed by a list of multiple choice answers, including an option for the student to list some other reason. I just instructed students to think of weeks when they do or don’t practice consistently and then answer the question as honestly as possible. It’s been interesting to see the results thus far, and I’m looking forward to compiling all of them and sharing the feedback with the parents to see what insights and/or ideas they might have for all of us working together to help the students develop more consistent practice habits!
Monday Mailbag – Free Scale and Key Signature Worksheets
Can you create worksheets for bass clef like the ones for treble clef (Major-Minor Scale Matchup and Key Signature-Scale Matchup)?
Your wish is my command. Haha! Maybe not quite, but I figured it was a logical next step to have bass clef scale and key signature worksheets that correlated with the treble clef ones, so here you go:
Major-Minor Scale Matchup Worksheet (2 pages)
Key Signature-Scale Matchup Worksheet (4 pages)
I hope you and your students are able to get lots of use out of these worksheets!
Remember, if you have a question you’d like to contribute to next week’s Monday Mailbag, leave it in the comments below or send me an e-mail sometime this week with Monday Mailbag in the subject line!
Recital Repertoire Pop Quiz – Free Worksheet
Thanks to the inspiration of Sarah Lantz, of the Piano Discoveries Studio, I decided to surprise my students with a pop quiz at our Christmas Recital rehearsal.
I just put together this simple Recital Repertoire Pop Quiz worksheet that I handed out to each student as they arrived – in exchange for the book with their printed music! They had to fill in as many blanks as they could. Then as each student performed their piece during the rehearsal, I tallied up their answers and awarded prizes to the top finishers. Three of my students tied for first place. And the others will hopefully make it a priority to know as much as possible about their recital repertoire selections in the future!
Giveaway of The Pianists’ Book of Musical Scales and Keys!
It’s always challenging trying to come up with a creative and musical gifts for students each year, but I love trying to think of something that will be special and useful. After quite a bit of brainstorming and reflecting on what students have appreciated most in the past, I settled on the idea of making a customized book for each of them. The students who received the Manuscript Books I made them several years ago love them and still use them all the time for compositions and other musical projects, so this year I decided to make each of them their own Book of Musical Scales and Keys.
It was one of my students who first gave me the idea of designing keyboard scale fingering diagrams and many of my students have used them since. A special book for each of them with a complete set of major, natural minor, and harmonic minor musical scales and keys on the staff with keyboard fingering diagrams below seemed like a perfect next step!
[Special thanks to Am Y for the use of her beautiful piano photo for the cover!]
As a way of wishing everyone a Happy New Year, I am giving away 3 copies of The Pianists’ Book of Musical Scales and Keys! Just leave a comment below for your chance to win a copy. The winner will be chosen using a random number generator on Thursday, January 12, at noon (CST). Enjoy!
Connect the Dots – Sans Numbers
After a number of requests for me to send the numberless version of the connect-the-dots pictures I referenced in last Friday’s post, A Memorable Way to Convince Students That Fingering is Important, I decided to just upload my simple Word doc and make it available for easy download and printing. Just click here or on the image below to download it and use it with your fingering-challenged students!
A Memorable Way to Convince Students that Fingering is Important…
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while I have a student who requires more than a convincing argument to believe that something I’m making them do is important. For example, fingering. I find this aspect of playing to be particularly challenging for students who learn to read the notes quickly. They seem to think that as long as they get to the right note at the right time, it doesn’t matter what finger(s) they use. Well, that may be true when they’re playing pieces at level one, but several years down the road, I assure them they will pretty much die musically if they haven’t developed the habit of using good, consistent fingering. That’s when I sometimes get the look – as if to say, “uh-huh…I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”
When I asked her recently, one of my students who has struggled with this for at least a year affirmed the above statement. She didn’t, in fact, think that fingering was important – contrary to what I’ve been telling her every week. So, it was time to come up with a creative and memorable (i.e. sticky) way to convince her that this reluctance would be her undoing in several years if she didn’t put in the effort to fix it now. We discussed it briefly and she was anxiously anticipating what I would come up with to convince her.
After considerable thought and prayer, I finally settled on an object lesson of sorts that I thought would do the trick. Enter: Dot-to-dot drawing sheets!
I printed off two of each of the following free dot-to-dot worksheets:
Since this student comes with her brother, I gave each of them a pencil and clipboard with the smiling flower dot-to-dot affixed. I instructed them to complete it as quickly as they could and that the winner would receive a complication coin (part of our An Italian Intrigue practice incentive theme this year!). The only hitch was that on my fingering-challenged student’s worksheet, I erased (via a computer program) all of the numbers.
Her brother finished a split second before her, but she didn’t seem to notice the lack of numbers and it didn’t faze her too much. On the second one however, it was a different story altogether! When I gave the signal to begin her brother was rapidly connecting dots while she sat in confusion connecting a few random dots, then erasing, then trying to figure out where to draw next. Eventually she got them all connected, but it didn’t look like a seahorse, and it took her almost a whole minute longer than her brother.
As I handed him his second coin, I explained that doing a dot-to-dot without the numbers is like trying to play a piece of music without using the correct fingers. At an early level you may be able to get by okay and play the piece how the composer intended it to be played, but at higher levels, it will take much longer to learn a piece and you may or may not be able to perform it as the composer intended it to be played. Using the correct fingering can make all the difference in the continuity, accuracy, and musicality of a piece.
When I finished the brief analogy my student was smiling (in spite of the fact that she lost out on two coins!). Only time will tell if it works, but I think she finally gets the importance of fingering now. She asked if she could keep the dot-to-dot coloring sheets and take them home with her. Of course I readily agreed. And added that she should display them prominently on the keyboard rack of her piano so that she is reminded to use good fingering every time she practices.
[Update: There were a lot of requests for the numberless version of the connect-the-dots pictures I used with my students, so I've uploaded my file and made it available for easy download and printing. It's just a simple Word doc with both the numbered and numberless version of each picture embedded. Click here to download and use with your students!]
Free Circle of 5ths Diagram in Color
The Piano Teacher Resource website is offering a free circle of 5ths diagram in wonderful bright colors for a limited time! We use the circle of 5ths all the time in the studio for learning and understanding keys and key signatures, so I think my students will enjoy this colorful version!
