What a delightful second day we had at piano camp today! With a combination of repetition and variety in the lesson plans each day, the students are becoming more familiar with what to expect and a quick pace keeps anyone from becoming bored. Here are highlights from today’s activities:
For our Welcome to Piano Camp song today, we pulled out the djembe!
To help reinforce our concepts of half steps and whole steps we played a game on the piano keys.
This Whole Step-Half Step game is always a favorite for my students. One of my older class students exclaimed, That was fun! as soon as we finished. Then he suggested playing tournament style so that the winners at each keyboard would compete against each other in rounds until a championship round. I thought that was a fabulous idea, so I’m going to try to incorporate it for the rest of the week!
For our Sing-it! time, we tried a technique Stephanie told us about to help better project our voices.
Instead of doing one longer song, with this piano camp curriculum (To the Grand Canyon with Grofé and His Suite), I chose two very short songs that can be sung with up to four parts to give the students some experience singing in harmony. We’ll see if it proves to be a disastrous choice by the end of the week!
The students always enjoy the coloring time. Today we listened to “The Painted Desert.”
For our improv time I briefly showed the students the whole tone scale and then asked for a couple volunteers who were willing to try a solo improv using those notes. I was so impressed with Langston and the creation she came up with that echoed the sounds of The Painted Desert!
Our outside game time involved an egg hunt today. Rory found both of his in less than a minute!
The older group was stumped for a while trying to find the final egg!
A couple students showed up this morning with hand-drawn piano pictures and notes. Yet another reason to love teaching these precious students at our summer piano camps!
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