Musical Fish Tank

Ah! I LOVE summer.  Things seem to slow down this time of the year. You get to splash in a pool, inner tube down a river, enjoy a refreshing snow cone or a tall glass of lemonade while chatting with your friends sitting in lawn chairs, have picnics, walk in the warm rain, listen to outdoor entertainment, watch movies in a park, and the best part about the summer is that there is more daylight!

I wanted my piano students to start off their summer piano session with a game that represented this season best.  I don't know about you but when I think of summer I think of water play!  While walking through Michael's­® (a craft/hobby store)  I came across a set of water creatures that were on sale and I got to thinking, "Now what I can I do with these?".  There were 6 creatures in a set as well as a small net so I bought 2 sets to cover 12 musical terms per level of instruction.  Here is a picture of a few of them.  

I immediately thought of dropping them in a container filled with water which I'd call the big fish tank.  I already had a plastic container sitting in our garage so no extra expenditure there and to get the most from my purchase at Michael's® I covered 5 different topics with all 12 creatures.  So on each creature there were 5 different terms.  You can see a few of them down below.  I wrote things everywhere; on fins, underbellies, heads, legs, just anywhere there was space.

This is where I got stuck.  What do I do next?  I asked my incredibly smart creative son who gave me the idea of getting a few smaller containers (tanks), filling them with water, and making it so that the children would need to sort the creatures out from the big "tank" into the smaller "tanks" based on what was shown on each container.  I headed over to the Dollar Tree® and found 4 plastic containers, placed a velcro dot on each which I already had (so once again no extra money spent there), created slips of paper to place on each of the smaller tanks with clip art, printed them out onto card stock, laminated them, cut them to size, and added a velcro dot on the backs of each card.  It was extremely easy to switch out the cards between lessons!  I had all of these supplies on hand already since I'm always needing them to create new games.  If you like creating games like I do a small laminator (one that can laminate a standard size piece of paper) is a great investment. 

                     

In the example above to the right I created cards to test some of my students' knowledge of their white notes.  One of the terms on each of the creatures were letter names corresponding to the pictures on each of the four containers. I drew a red dot on a particular note for each picture of notes.

I decided to set this game up outside so that I wouldn't need to worry about my students making a watery mess inside my house.  I set a table up, covered it with a plastic table cover, filled the big "tank" and 4 smaller "tanks" up with water from our outside hose, and the game was ready!  My younger students (up to the age of 10 years) played this game and couldn't get enough of it.  I told them that they needed to scoop the creatures out of the big tank with the net, pick them up them from the net with their fingers, look for the term they needed, and place them in to smaller tanks where they belonged.  I had to help my really young students out by directly pointing to the term on the creature they needed to identify and after telling me the meaning of the term I pointed to the smaller "tank" it belonged in if they were not able to read on their own.  I gave them 4 minutes to complete it and let them know periodically how much time they had left to keep them on track.  The total cost of this game was $13.00 but I could have saved $5.00 if I had bought the water creatures from Dollar Tree®.

 I'm not sure if you have a Dollar Tree® ­ near you but they are selling a set of 3 creatures and a fishing pole as I am writing this blog (Picture above).  I happen to like the more 3 dimensional creatures that Michael's® had so I splurged a bit plus I managed to get 5 games out of  it.  I may even fit more terms onto each of those little critters as time goes on and get even more games out of it! Until next time.  Piano blogger signing off......