Blog Archives

The Bear and the Bird: A Story-Based Improv Activity for Beginners

12/31/2019

The new year is always a great time for incorporating a few fresh, creative activities into our lessons! With that in mind, today I am sharing one of my favorite creative activities for beginning students: a story-based improv activity.

This is a great activity for helping students become comfortable creating sounds at the piano away from the written page. I tell students that for this activity, I am the narrator and they are my "sound effect engineers." Their job is to choose a sound on the piano that they think fits the story as we read it together.

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3 Tips for Taking the Mystery out of Memorization

12/27/2019

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Today I am sharing this article that I wrote for the blog at Tonara.com.

If you aren't familiar with Tonara, it is a unique app with a variety of features that enable teachers to manage their studio and motivate their students to practice. Visit Tonara's website HERE to learn more!

Will your students be participating in recitals, festivals, or competitions in the coming year? If so, chances are that they will be required to memorize some, if not all, of their music for these events.

When did memorization become such a big deal, and how can we help our students to develop this important skill? Read on for my tips for taking the mystery out of memorization!

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The Repertoire Pyramid

12/13/2019

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Today I am sharing this article that I wrote for the blog at Tonara.com.

If you aren't familiar with Tonara, it is a unique app with a variety of features that enable teachers to manage their studio and motivate their students to practice. Visit Tonara's website HERE to learn more!

Assigning and pacing the repertoire we use with our students is one of the most challenging tasks we face as music teachers. The music we assign not only shapes the development of our students’ technical skills--it can also play a huge role in maintaining our students’ motivation to practice.

Some of the difficulties we might encounter in assigning student repertoire include:

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Freebie alert: Christmas Jumble Worksheets!

12/7/2019

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I know I just shared a whole list of Christmas resources in my last blog post, but I created these "Christmas Jumble" worksheets for my holiday group class today and I had to share! My students got a big kick out of playing the "jumbled" versions of their favorite Christmas songs and trying to sing the lyrics out of order.

These worksheets are a fun way to get students drawing notes correctly on the staff and reviewing the notational rules of stem directions and drawing accidentals. Once students have unscrambled the measures and written them on the staff, you can challenge them to:

Sing the next phrase of the song and try to play it by ear.
Transpose the line to a different key.
Harmonize the line with chords from the scale.

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The Bear and the Bird: A Story-Based Improv Activity for Beginners

3 Tips for Taking the Mystery out of Memorization

The Repertoire Pyramid

Freebie alert: Christmas Jumble Worksheets!

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