One of my challenges the last couple of years has been planning group class games for my piano students that work for a combination of online and in person attendees. I primarily teach in person, but have a couple students who are mostly online and I want to include them as much as possible in our monthly group classes.
This week we tried a new game that worked really well! I called it Symbol Scribe. (It’s adapted from this blog post.) The students were split into two teams and each team was given a dry erase board and marker. The team pictured above included an online student.
It was also a perfect game for a variety of ages and levels (additional criteria that I always have to consider since my group classes are for my whole studio!). I called out a category and then each team had 2 minutes to write as many terms or symbols on the board as they could that belonged to those categories. For example, we did these categories: Tempo-related; Dynamics-related; Articulation-related; Orchestra instruments; and Classical composers. A couple others we didn’t get to: Kinds of notes; Things you might find on a piece of printed music.
If both teams had a term or symbol, they each received one point. If only one of them had it and it was on my list, they received two points. If one team had it and I didn’t have it on my list, they received three points. The winning team each received two 10-degree coins that are part of this year’s practice incentive theme. It was a ton of fun and the teams stayed neck and neck through each round right up until the end!
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