Review and Giveaway of NoteBusters!

It seems fitting to launch the New Year with a wonderful giveaway!

Have you ever had one of those moments working with a supposedly late elementary student when you pointed to a note on the staff and watched them look quizzically at it before taking the next several minutes to try to figure out what it is? I know I can’t be the only one who has students who manage to make it through years of lessons only to discover that they are still sort of sketchy on their note identification. Well, today’s giveaway is for just such students. Or, if you want to be a proactive teacher, for beginning students so that they won’t stand a chance of not learning their notes!

Note Busters by Karen Spurney and Steven Gross is a collection of hundreds of note identification exercises, neatly organized to allow for lots and lots of reinforcement. It reminds me of the math drill sheets I did ad nauseum growing up. However, there was a certain enjoyment in being able to work as quickly as possible through each set of simple equations, and to this day I can calculate mathematical problems very quickly in my head. So I’m excited to have a resource like Note Busters available and plan to order several copies to try them out with some of my students.

The publishers of Note Busters have some fabulous deals for teachers: Get 30% off all workbooks, or get 40% off any order of 3 or more workbooks. Just complete the teacher discount request to receive your discount code. Use the code when purchasing books through the Note Busters CreateSpace Store. Amazingly, the authors have even offered to create custom-designed exercises by request from teachers and make them available as PDFs!

Now, for the best part…the authors are giving away one copy of Note Busters to a Music Matters Blog reader! Just leave a comment below to be entered in the drawing. The winner will be selected using a random number generator at noon (CST) on Thursday, January 17, 2013.

[Thanks to the authors of Note Busters for sending me a complimentary copy of their book for this review!]