Several of my student’s moms commented on how much they liked the timeline that I used for our listening activity last week. This is one of the best timelines I’ve found! I love that it incorporates not only music history, but also little glimpses into other things going on in the world. Surprisingly, the timeline actually came from the back of the Hal Leonard Student Journal. I just tore out the pages and glued them together chronologically, then laminated it for durability. It has served me well for many years!

In keeping with our Exploring a Galaxy of Music theme for the year, last week’s Briefing Session (a.k.a. group class) was themed A Galaxy of Composers. Here are a couple shots from the evening:

I held this session at the studio, so twenty of us crammed into the small space to listen to performances, play games, and learn about the various composers.

Prior to playing their piece, each student shared a brief report about the composer of their selection. I was impressed with the creativity employed in putting together their reports (the one pictured included a PowerPoint presentation)!

I’ve uploaded a free set of the A Galaxy of Composers Lesson Plans I developed for this class. If you’re interested in doing a composer-themed group class with your students, feel free to download and use the file and corresponding activities. We had a ton of fun with it!

In the same e-newsletter from Music Educator’s Marketplace that I mentioned Tuesday, there was a link to free online music resources. The page it led to is this fabulous collection of Free Online Resources for Teachers, Students, Parents. The page is divided into several helpful categories:

• Teacher Helpers and Resources
• Free Teaching Aids to Print Out
• Free Music Graphics and Clip Art
• Free Online Student Activities
• Resources to Share with Parents
• Free Piano Music to Download/Print
• Not Entirely Free But Worth a Look.

Karen Koch is the one responsible for compiling the list and she has done a fabulous job of it!

Jerald Simon, of the Music Motivation Blog, is developing a page full of fabulous free downloadable music theory worksheets! Current worksheets include major and minor pentascales, intervals, chord inversions, and chord progressions. What a great resource, especially for students preparing for state theory tests! He is planning to add one new download every day for the next eight months, so you’ll want to keep an eye on this site.

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.

I’ve received some questions about the latest practice incentive that I uploaded to the website, so I thought it would be helpful to give a few more details here for those interested in possibly using it in their studios. It’s called Mastering the Mystery of Music.

This is the one I used with my students last year. My goal in developing it was to challenge them to work toward mastery of different skills. The Assignment Book includes a set of Mastery Challenge worksheets that are separated into eight different categories: Staff Scout, Scale Sleuth, Rhythm Recon, Key Signature Specialist, Terminology Trainer, Chord Commander, and Arpeggio Agent.

Each category contains a list of 5-7 specific mastery challenges. The student chooses two mastery challenges each week and works toward having them mastered by the following week (along with whatever other repertoire assignments they are working on). If they are successful, then they are given the clue for that week. At the end of each session (there are six sessions throughout the year), they use the information from their clues to research and try to find out what the answer is.

The clues and answers all fall within a particular category, like: The Symphony Orchestra (where they are trying to figure out what the mystery instrument is), Great Pianists (where they are trying to figure out the identity of a particular pianist), God’s Mystery Revealed (where they are trying to identify what famous person said a series of quotes), Not-So-Famous Composers (where they are trying to identify the name of a composer), Folk Songs of the World (where they are trying to figure out the name of a specific folk song), and Ancient Instruments (where they are trying to figure out the name of an ancient instrument). After they’ve solved that mystery, they look back through their clues to figure out which one is the false clue.

Then, at a group class (aka Private Eye Workshop – or at the following lesson for those who can’t attend the workshop), I give them the code to crack the clue that’s hidden inside the false clue. The mystery word from the false clue is then entered into a blank on their Detective Worksheet so that by the end of the year they have discovered the sentence that reveals what The Mystery of Music is.

This particular Practice Incentive includes both print-ready and editable files for the Assignment Books so that you can either use it as-is or adapt it in any way for your own studio use. You can use the clues, mystery words, and Private Eye Workshop lesson plans that are included or you can re-create your own according to your studio goals and needs. Either way, I hope that your students have a blast being super sleuths and that it inspires them to work hard and “master the mystery of music”!

One of the things that I really wanted to work on this year with my students was building their sight-reading skills. This was a key objective that I took into consideration when planning this year’s practice incentive. With the help of Susan Paradis’ Notes in the Fast Lane worksheets, I am seeing some great improvement in this area!

I made multiple copies of each level and placed them in sheet protectors in a notebook. One of the Cosmic Challenges that the students can select each week is “Speed Notes.” In order to pass that Cosmic Challenge, the two levels that they take home must be played the following week with 100% accuracy. Yes, the student actually gets to practice the worksheet all week long! The notes are random enough that even those with really good ears find it almost impossible to play back the patterns by ear even after a week of practice. But for the rare student who actually does memorize the pattern, I just randomly select the lines for them to play. After the initial shock of me making such a request, we find out if the student is really reading the notes or not.

One of the reasons I really like these worksheets is because while the notes are random, they are also placed in the context of a grand staff where the student can still have some sense of intervallic (or at least directional) relationships between notes. This is an aspect of sight-reading that is lost when only individual note flash cards are used.

I’m doing several other things to help build sight-reading skills, but this is proving to be one of the most helpful so far. Plus, the students love the challenge associated with it and are eager to get through as many levels as they can!

Rebecca W. just alerted me recently to this fabulous Musopen website! Have you seen it yet? They have an enormous selection of music (audio) and sheet music that can be accessed for free, played from the site, downloaded, and embedded into other websites. In fact, as I type this, I am enjoying listening to a recording of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, Opus 104, I Allegro performed by the Davis High School Symphony Orchestra (pretty good for a high school group!).

The people behind Musopen are also working on a public domain music theory textbook. Sounds like a great concept and an interesting project! From the comments on this post, I also found out about a free music theory course by Catherine Schmidt-Jones that looks like a great resource!

One of my favorite new tools to use with students are these fabulous keyboard labels that Susan Paradis, of the Piano Teacher Resources blog, created. I’ve started sticking one or more of these labels in the student’s assignment book and having them say the whole-step half-step pattern and place X’s on the corresponding keys. In light of some of our recent discussions on scale fingerings, it occurred to me that you could also use these to have the student write the finger number that plays each key instead of just marking the key with an X. It seems like that could be particularly effective; I’ll have to try it!

Here’s another fun activity that I did last week to reinforce scales. Hayley chose memorizing the Major sharp key signatures for her Cosmic Challenge last week and did a fabulous job, so I decided to reward her with this game:

1. Hayley randomly chose a flashcard with a Major sharp key signature from my hand.
2. When I said go, I started a timer and she could look at the card. Then she had to select and arrange the scale blocks to form the corresponding Major scale. (I encouraged her to line up all the notes diatonically first and then go back through and rotate them to indicate the appropriate sharps.)
3. After she was done, she would say “stop” and I would stop the timer. (I had told her that she would earn 10 points if she arranged the blocks correctly without any input from me. She asked if she could earn bonus points for doing it faster, so that’s when we added the timer element!)

Hayley loved playing this game and was quite pleased with all the points she racked up in the process! I really love all the great discussion and ideas that have been shared in regard to scales lately – it’s re-motivating me to emphasize scale theory and playing with all my students. I’d love to hear any other great ideas for helping students work on scale theory and/or playing!

I could totally relate to this comment that Mindy left on Monday’s Teaching Scales post and I’m sure that many others can as well!

But truth be told, I am sick to death of teaching scales. It’s not that I don’t think it is important, I do. I am just lacking incentive to go at it again with my students. They are in shock! Perhaps I need to rethink my approach and we will all be more successful. I’d take any incentive ideas you have for getting through all the scales.

So I thought maybe we could do some brainstorming and share ideas of ways to make learning all the scales more exciting. I’ll start with a few that come to mind:

* For starters, I include this scale and chord progress chart in my students’ assignment books each year. This helps us at least keep track of what scales they’ve learned.

* Plan a fun Olympic event centered on scales. Give the students a designated number of weeks to learn as many scales as possible and then place them on teams and have them compete against each other in a scale relay. You can watch a video from one of my piano camps where we did this. Here’s a post with a more detailed explanation.

* Make several sets of scale blocks and focus more on the theory-side of constructing scales for a while. You could teach the major and/or minor scale patterns and then have them close their eyes and draw out a block from the jar. Then time them to see how fast they can construct that scale. You could post the times or just record them in their assignment book to see if they can improve their times from week to week.

I’m sure there are tons of ideas that can help us incorporate scales into lessons in a way that we don’t become sick of them. Feel free to leave your ideas below or post them on your blog and link back to them! This should be fun!