Making piano lessons fun and engaging!

  Where I live, school has started today and I don't know about your students, but most of mine are not looking forward to going back to "work".  I spent the last week (during my staycation) creating this obstacle course for them.  I wanted to make their piano lesson extra special this week! I hope it goes as well in real life as I have been imagining it to go in my head. Lol! Update : it is going extremely well! Phew! The students who came today 8/14/23 (their ages ranging from 7-15 years) loved it. Their smiles and giggles made it all worth it. Yay! Side note: Do any of you struggle with grammar? In particular, when to use the present tense and past tense? I struggle with this every time I write something!  It makes me want to avoid putting myself out there altogether for fear of being judged but reading Brené Brown's books have helped me greatly.  Judgers will always judge.  It's up to me to step into "the arena" as Brown puts it and share something t...

Hello All! This week and next my students' metronome activity will be throwing velcro balls at a  target to different rhythm patterns like the one from the picture above.  I laminated the rhythm sheets, adhered two pieces of scotch tape on the inside of my front door before adding a  velcro dot to it for easy removal, added a velcro dot to the backs of the rhythm sheets to stick on the door, and mounted the target onto a  damage free hook . Step 1: I had my students clap and count their rhythm pattern out loud.  Step 2: They repeated step one with a metronome beat.  Step 3 : They grabbed the number of balls needed to throw at the target while counting out loud keeping in time with the metronome.   I told them to stay focused on the rhythm while throwing the velcro balls and not to get distracted if some of the balls didn't stick.  As long as they completed to pattern the balls that actually stuck to the target would count towards their ov...

Hi All!  I decided to have 2 different types of hunts going on last week.  I already posted one of the hunts, now I'll share this one.  I especially like this version because there's no resetting of the game between lessons and it goes a lot fast. I purchased a few bags of Autumn decor from Walmart like the ones above but you could probably find these on Amazon.  There were 8-10 items per bag.  I drew musical terms on each of the items (picture above) and placed sets of them in plastic storage bags. In addition to drawing a term on each of the pieces I wrote down the bag number they belonged to, just in case they were to fall out of their bags and get all mixed up.  I wrote down the list of terms from each bag on a piece of paper so that I could quickly decide which term I wanted each of my students to look for from the bags. I also drew the opposite of the terms on other pieces to make sure they really knew their stuff.  Look back at the first picture...

  Hi All! This week and next week my kiddos are going on a scavenger hunt that starts in the studio and continues outside to the front yard.  Above is a picture of one of the hiding places near the piano bench. I created six scavenger hunt clue cards; a set for my older students (picture above) and a set for my younger students (picture below). I left the last word out of each rhyme for my older students to figure out.  I laminated them. I bought a few inexpensive decorative pumpkins from Walmart and put velcro dots on them like the picture below.   A few of my students have just learned their C position notes from the grand staff so that's what I'm using the hunt to test them on.  I've also created matching items to test other things like sharped and flatted notes, musical terms, primary chords, melodic/harmonic intervals, Major vs. minor scales, etc.  Here's a picture of one set of pumpkins below.  They hunt for the pumpkins that match the pictu...

  Happy Autumn! This week my students are completing an art activity.  This activity is easy to assemble and adds a nice artistic component to my lessons. I first drew a bare tree and made multiple copies of it.  Then I used clip art to write out meanings of musical terms and printed the terms onto 8"x 11" self adhesive shipping labels so that I could adhere the pieces onto the tree without the added step of using glue. I drew music symbols onto confetti leaves.  Down below is what I purchased from a nearby  hobby store. It came 300 to a pack! I poured some craft glue onto a paper plate and had my students use a Q-tip to dip into the glue and smear it onto the term they wanted the leaf to adhere to.  It takes no more than 2-3 minutes for my students to complete this activity and they're left with a beautiful piece of fall art. Until next time, piano blogger signing off......

Yay! Summer is finally upon us.  I decided to start the summer session off with a game that many kiddos have played at some point in their childhood!  Among some of the creative scenarios were "The Floor is Quicksand", "The Floor is an Ocean Full of Sharks", and of course "The Floor is Lava". We must give credit where credit is due regarding the origins of this activity.  Any and every child who has ever played some version of this are the original creators! Folks such as myself have simply created our own version of this popular childhood game!  A picture is worth a thousand words so I will share a lot of pictures with you instead of loading this blog with a whole bunch of unnecessary written text.   Above is the gameboard I created.  Cody, our dog, had to be a part of the fun.  He is lava proof of course! Lol. I purchased 2 plastic table covers from Amazon and taped them to the floor.  I then gathered a ton of oversized books around our hou...

This week my younger students will be  "planting" flowers in this festive flower garden!  I have to say, it's WONDERFUL to be teaching lessons IN PERSON again.  Woohoo!  Virtual lessons served it's purpose during a tough time but nothing compares to holding lessons in the studio!  Back to the game...... The kiddos are given a basket full of faux flowers with musical terms, intervals, notes, etc. attached to the leaves with velcro dots.  There are four containers around the flower garden that have styrofoam squares underneath the "grass" for the flowers to stick to and musical terms adhered to the outside with velcro dots.  The kiddos look at the item on the leaf of each flower and match it to the correct items on the container.  There are twelve items in all. I give my students five minutes to "plant" their flowers.  So far my younger students are loving this game!  Stay tuned for more in-studio ideas.    Piano blogger signing ...