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Piano Camp Day Four – To the Grand Canyon with Grofé and His Suite

June 13, 2024 by natalie Leave a Comment

The most exciting moment of piano camp today came when one of my 8-year old boys finally decided to disclose the “classified” object in his pocket and it proceeded to jump onto the floor! That’s right, it was a real live toad! Truly, never a dull moment! Now, on to other highlights:

The light-up drum sticks are always a favorite instrument choice for our Welcome to Piano Camp song!

It’s been fun to see how much the students are enjoying our Skip to My Lou folk dances. We have two versions we’ve learned – a partner version and a pass the object version. After we sang and danced the pass the object version today, they started begging to do the partner version, too!

We could not have had a more perfect day for the much-anticipated water balloon toss game – 90+ degrees and sunny!

Now that the students have learned half and whole steps, we explored the difference between the Major pentascale pattern and the minor pentascale pattern. I had them write a large capital M if I displayed a Major pentascale and a small lowercase m if I displayed a minor pentascale. They got a kick out of seeing how large they could write their capital Ms and how microscopic they could write their little ms!

My older group is loving using the Heartbeat Rhythms to create their own rhythm patterns during our Beat-It! time.

Improvising at the piano with Stephanie is another beloved activity. Adah especially loved getting to use the f#-minor pentascale for their improvisation today!

I let the older kids have a free-for-all with the remaining water balloons after their class, so several of them got drenched before enjoying their fruit popsicle snack today!

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Filed Under: Game Ideas, Group Class Ideas, Listen and Love, Piano Camp Ideas, Piano Expeditions

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