Lots of Goofs!

Lots of Goofs!

Have you ever worked on composing with your students and noticed how much trouble they have with all the little rules about symbol placement? Sometimes students ask me why it is so important to put everything in the exact place, and I remind them that music notation has been around for hundreds of years and used by people all over the world. We are very precise so it will stay that way.

This sheet will also help students who are preparing for theory exams.  As a state theory grader for many years, I noticed in particular that students put whole and half rests on the wrong line, stems on the wrong side and in the wrong direction, accidentals after the note, and flags are all over the place!

I made this for students who are about 9 and 10 years old and taking level 4 of the Texas State Theory Test, but one of my younger students asked if I would make an easier version because he thought it looked like fun. If you have any ideas of what should be on an easier version for 6 and 7 year olds, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do!

Easter Season Games and Printables

Front                                                            BackEaster Egg Hunt

You might have seen this game last year, but I am posting it again for teachers new to this site. You will have to print on both sides, so be sure to adjust your printer settings carefully before you start. Cut them out and hide the eggs around your studio. Your younger students will be so excited when you tell them they are going on an Easter egg hunt!  When they find an egg, they clap or tap the rhythm. If your students can’t clap 8th notes, print only the first side and write in the rhythms you want to use. It is a fun diversion and a nice treat at the end of a lesson. Plus, students get to practice reading rhythms! If Easter eggs are not appropriate for your students, give me a suggestion and I might be able to come up with something else.

As an aside, and coming from a music education specialist,  *quarter, quarter, two eighths, quarter*, is the easiest rhythm pattern for children to clap. It is the first rhythm clapping pattern I start with. Just because eighth notes are not in beginning piano books doesn’t mean you  have to wait for the second or third year of piano to learn them.  Students can learn all sorts of rhythm patterns before they actually play them in their music, using syllables or words to clap the rhythm.

Here are some more Easter season activities from my website, including two composing activities for beginners. In the Music section of my website, www.susanparadis.com you can also find some beginning hymns you might be able to use. I also have a Mother’s Day composing printable.

• Easter Egg Notes
• Easter Egg Find the Notes
• See the Bunny - a pre-reading composing activity
• See the Bunny - an on the staff composing activity
• Follow the Bunny Trail

New Staff Paper for Student Compositions

Staff Paper for Student Compositions

Over the weekend I had a bunch of student compositions that I promised  I would engrave in Finale.  It took me a very long time as I shuffled through different size copies that I could barely read. Some didn’t have student names and I had to guess who they belonged to.  As I was working, I reminded myself that a few things would help make it easier:

1. Write their name, date, and the title of their piece on each page.
2. Number each page.
3. Always give their piece some sort of title.
4. Remind  students to always number their measures.
5. Staple their pages together so they won’t get lost.
6. Use pencil, but go over it with a darker pencil so I can read it and photocopy it.

It was at this point that I decided to make some new staff paper for them with a grand staff, bar lines, the measures numbered, and a place for their name, title, and date. I posted it here in case other teachers are interested. Perhaps some of the other web sites on my blog roll have paper like this, and I have to admit I forgot to check. I was working in Finale at the time and this just popped right out!

I’m going to try this out with my students and see how it goes. Over time, if I see some changes that need to be made, I’ll revise it.

There are actually two pages to this PDF. If you don’t want the measures written in, but still want the grand staff, print only the second page.  I also made another set exactly like this with a larger staff for younger children. For those of you who want plain, ordinary blank staff paper, I have previously posted several sizes, so do a search to print out what you want.

Fourth of July Composing Activity

Fourth of July Composing Activity

If you have summer students or a summer music camp, you might be interested in this Fourth of July composing activity. This activity may take too long to do in a lesson, so students can do some at home, or you can work on it for several weeks in the lesson. 

As an introduction ask the students what instrument they would like to play in a marching band. Ask what is the difference in a band and an orchestra? Often children have never thought of that.

First learn the rhythm by saying and tapping the words. Find the syncopation and circle it if necessary. For younger students you may want to cross through the tied notes. Ask if they know why there are two notes over the word “band”.

Students can write their music in any key; this does not have to be in middle C position.  Beginning composers can write just a melody and alternate using the right and left hand on each staff system. Older students will want to write a melody with harmony. If they know tonic and dominate chords, even the 2- note variety, they will want to use them. Encourage all students to play a drum pattern in 5ths as an introduction. They can also improvise a coda using the same rhythm with the drum getting softer as the band marches away in the distance. It might be old hat to us, but not to the student. Elementary children think very concretely.

Remember good composing techniques such as repetition or sequence.  I have already built in rhythm repetition. There is nothing wrong with some lines being the same.  It is usually safe to use some sort of question and answer form. Often I will tell them to repeat one line and we decide that before we start to compose. This piece has the same rhythm in the first and last line. Show students how the melody can be the same except for the last few notes. The first line can end on the dominant and the last line on the tonic.  It is OK to set some limits, like only use steps and repeats, or steps, skips and repeats.  This actually helps the students.

Fathers Day Song

Father’s Day is almost here so I’m posting this Father’s Day Song again in case you would like to use it with your summer students and didn’t see it the first time around. This is a good activity to do at a lesson this time of the year,  depending on the age of the student and the time you have. Your student might be able to think of some words to go with the rhythm. I wonder how many students can figure out that quarter, quarter, half is the rhythm to I Love You. To speed things up, you can play some ideas, let the student decide, and you write it in for your student. To print, click on Father’s Day Song and when you get to my web site, click preview. If you have Adobe Reader on your computer you will be able to print it out.

ComposeCreate-Wendy’s site

Lately there has been a lot of talk on the web by piano teachers  about teaching our students how to compose. I have  posted a lot of activities for beginning students to compose, and I hope this has helped to get  the ball rolling.  But often teachers need more than just an activity. Wendy Stevens  is a very accomplished composer who has a blog to help with music composition. I’ve had a link to her site for quite a while over in my blog roll,  and recently she has been posting some great ideas about how to encourage our students to compose. If you click here, you will go to her post “10 ways to encourage composition in your studio”.

Please let me know how your composition efforts have turned out. I would love to post some student compositions here on my blog. If you have  student composition your student would like to share, send it along or even part of it along. I think a lot of teachers would feel better about teaching composition if they could see some examples of at least parts of some compositions! I can use or not use the name of your student, depending on your preferences. Even just a few measure would be helpful.

Father’s Day Composing Activity

I didn’t want to leave off Dad, so I wrote a Father’s Day composing activity.  Unless you have real young students, by this time of the year students are now reading notes. However, this piece is a little challenging to students who have just started reading music.  There are several skips which you will need to circle and practice in the air. You will notice that I put the RH thumb on D and not middle C.  That is because I like to use other positions besides  middle C. I think it is easier on the bridge of the hand, and in the long run, helps music reading by intervals.  

This piece is written in the C pentatonic scale. Here is a suggested way to teach this activity. Step one is for beginning  or  problem readers. Skip this step if your student can sight read this section. 

1. Learn the 8 measures that are already composed by tapping the rhythm on the fall board while singing the words. Alternate between singing the words and your favorite way to count the rhythm. Find and circle the skips with a marker. Point out and draw a square around the leap of a 4th in measure 5 with another marker color.  If they haven’t learned about 4ths, call it a leap.  Play measure 6  in the air.  Have the student play one hand while you play the other. Switch sides.  On the fall board tap the rhythm using the correct hands for each staff.  When the student is ready, play both hands.

2. Tap the rhythm of the composing section. Discuss some possible words that will go with the rhythm. If your student has some ideas, write them in. If the student comes up with a different rhythm, change the rhythm notes I wrote above the staff.  

3. On another staff such as a white board or a large staff , show the 5 notes in this piece. Have your student play these notes and only use them in their composition.  Unless they change hand positions, the last note should be  bass clef middle C.

4. Going measure by measure, write in the notes on the staff. The student should play the previous measure before writing a new one so it makes musical sense. When finished, play the new section several times and adjust if necessary.

Sometimes students don’t like to follow suggestions and want to write notes that make no musical sense. There are several reasons for this such as a power play, silliness, a contrary nature, or  genuine musical curiosity.  I stay flexible and if I see a battle coming, I let them write whatever they want, as long as they can play it. Don’t engage your student in an attention seeking power play.  You know what kind of student I am talking about!

Mother’s Day on staff

Mother’s Day on the staff

I wanted a Mother’s Day activity for my students in Level 1,  so I modified the my pre-reading  Mother’s Day activity.  While it may look similar to the one I posted a few days ago,  because I reused  my flowers and graphics,  I wrote a new tune especially for this activity. This time I used steps and skips and two measures of hands together playing that is often a challenge at this level.

I call these measures the “tricky bits” and we learn them first,  hands separate. Then we play measure 3 and 4 hands together, but not on the keys. We play them in  the air, on the fall board, on our arm or leg, and any other way that strikes our fancy. By the time we finally get around to playing it on the piano, it is so firmly in the student’s muscle memory that the tricky bits become the “easy bits”. If they need a little more practice hands together, we start at the bottom of the keyboard and play going up or down in all the octaves. This takes a while, but it pays off when they get home. Students are more likely to practice if they have already worked out the “tricky bits.”

Mother’s Day Pre-reading Activity

This is a Mother’s Day activity for the young beginner. 

I had a lot of fun making it and I hope it’s not over the top with all the pink polka-dots and hearts!

When I wrote this, I decided to make the tune very easy with only one measure containing steps and skips. I didn’t put any instructions on the sheet so students can present it to their Moms as a Mother’s Day present. If you have never used composing activities like this one, email me for instructions.

 If this activity seems too easy for your students and students are familiar with pentascales,  choose a challenging key.  In the white center of the green flowers at the bottom of the page, the student can either fill in finger numbers or note names. Since the composing section  is so short, encourage your student to move up or down octaves and not just stay in one hand position. My students love to try something different, even if it doesn’t make a lot of musical sense and I’m very accepting because that will encourage them to compose more.

If you want a pretty way  for students to present this to their Mother,  trim off the white border, laminate it, and add a pink bow. Or you could print it off on sturdy card stock or glue it to foam board.  If you have any other ideas, let me know!

Notate “See the Bunny” on a staff

Some elementary students are too old to use the pre-reading composition activity I posted a few days ago. My older elementary students, around 2nd to 4th grade,   want to write it on a staff.  Students older than that don’t want bunnies and jelly beans, so we start with staff paper.  Today I am posting a companion to the pre-reading See the Bunny composition activity I posted last week. In a few weeks I hope to post some composing sheets for older students.

The composition activity sheet I am posting today is too long  to complete in one lesson unless you have a lesson devoted solely to composition.  There are several ways to speed it up:

• The teacher can write in the notes for the student.
• Have the students write only whole notes on the staff and later change them into quarter and half notes.
• Keep the activity in a folder and work on it over a longer time period.

You probably have some more ideas, so pass them along.

I received some requests from teachers to post this. If you have any students complete this activity, it would make my day to see their compositions. If you don’t have a scanner you can use a camera phone  and send it to my email address.

To print today’s post, click here.

See the Bunny – a composing activity

See the Bunny – a  Composing Activity

One of  my younger students like to write rhymes. He told me they go through his head all the time and he can’t get them to stop, so he has to write them down. I told him I know exactly what he means. The same thing happens to me except mine have melodies that go along with them.  I jot them down on scrap paper, napkins, receipts, anything really. If I don’t write the melody down, I’ll forget it, so in my purse there are little scraps of paper with sol-fa syllables written under these simple rhymes. I have no idea where they come from in my head, but it’s been going on all my life. They’re not suitable for anything but children’s primer music.  Still, I hope my students and maybe some of yours, too, enjoy my efforts.

Several students wanted a composing activity for Easter, and as I was stopped at a red light a few days ago, I wrote this one down. The hardest part, really, is when my students start making up their own melody to go with the words. I have to try very hard not to suggest the tune in my head and let them come up with their own ideas.

A rhyme this long might take too long at a lesson, so maybe it would be a good idea to do one line a week. The average child has a hard time doing this at home, so that’s why I do it at the lesson. Most children like to create melodies, just as they like to draw and do crafts. We just have to help them along a little.

If I have time and get enough requests,  I’ll make another sheet with lines and spaces for older children.

St. Patrick’s Day On-the-Staff Composing Activity

St. Patrick’s Day Composing Activity

I had a lot of fun making this composition worksheet. I drew the rainbow graphic  for a game I have been trying to design but I decided to use it here instead.  I’m not sure if I will get the game finished by March 17!

I have several students who want to notate the Shamrock Composing Activity on a real staff, so that’s why I made this sheet. One student wrote a melody divided between the hands,  and another student is writing the melody in the right hand and we’re going to make up an accompaniment later.

Thoughts on Composing Activities

I gave some of my students the option of doing the Shamrock Composing Activity that I posted yesterday. Since they had all done the Valentine composing activity, and the Christmas Train, I thought maybe they would decline. However, they were enthusiastic about it so we gave it a try.   Young children love doing the same thing over and over. That is how they gain confidence and why, the younger the child, the more material you need.  Eventually they do want to move on, which is why I asked them if they were interested.

I noticed that the students who have been using my composing activities this year are getting a lot better at composing. They all knew it would sound good to start and end on the key note, although I just called it the 5-finger scale.  One student wanted to write her piece in one of the new pentascales she had learned, and was very proud she added the sharps on her own. She is a beginning student and hasn’t even learned sharps in her lesson book, but has seen them in the games we’ve been playing.

Another student wasn’t quite sure he wanted to do it. He said the Valentine song he wrote was too hard to play. In that piece his notes were all over the place, leaping from top to bottom. This time I suggested he write only steps and repeated notes, no skips. He  is a very young student and hasn’t really learned how to play skips. This time he stepped up and down,  like his 5-finger scales and discovered how much easier it was. He liked this piece a lot better  because he can play it with ease.  He was having a little trouble with the ending, so I suggested 3 different endings to help him out, and he had very definite ideas about what he thought sounded good. I think it is perfectly acceptable to help the students out with ideas, because that’s how they are going to learn. It was also interesting that each student wrote the top line for the Right Hand and the bottom line for the Left Hand.

The first time I did a composing activity with these students in the fall,  it seemed to take forever. Now they know what they are doing and are quicker. They are also enjoying themselves more. I’m getting better at directing them, too.  I’m also excited that if I follow through on these composing activities I might have more composers in my studio. It really makes music come alive, to write your own.

After using the Shamrock Composing Activity with my students, I decided I needed to re-do it, so if you print it out today you will notice some differences from the previous post.   First, I fixed the font so the Celtic “D” doesn’t look like an “O”. I added some dots on the “i’s” and did a few other alterations to the font. Next time I’m not going to get *fancy* with  fonts for little children. I also made the shamrocks lighter so that students could actually see what they wrote. On the old handout, we had to go over each letter with a Sharpie because the shamrocks were too dark to read what they wrote.

The next step, for students who can actually read notes, will be to write their song in musical notation. I’m going to post a handout for that as soon as possible, I hope.

Eventually I want to have a composing activity for all the special days of the year, with a corresponding activity so they can write their song on a staff.

St. Patrick’s Day Pre-Reading Composing Activity

Let’s Go Marching on St. Patrick’s Day

If you missed the Valentine composing activity and wanted another chance, you can do this St. Patrick’s day activity. Yes, I know a march isn’t in 3/4 time, but that’s the only rhyme I could come up with. I’m not a professional! Let me know if your students enjoy it!

This is a pre-reading activity, or for beginners who don’t know all the notes on the grand staff. In the shamrocks below the notes, students can either put finger numbers or letter names.

[This is newly revised 2012 version.]

Write a Valentine’s Song

Write a Valentine’s Song is is a composing activity in 3/4 time for young beginners. I didn’t write in directions on this so that you may use it in different ways.  Students can write in finger numbers or note notes. They can use left hand, right hand, or both. They can draw in bar lines if you wish and a double bar line at the end. In fact, you can use this as a rhythmic activity and not even bother to compose a tune.

If you use this to compose with a slightly older beginner, the next step would be to notate it on staff paper. I have some large size staff paper on my web site.

I have found that students often cannot complete both lines in the lesson. Sometimes I send it home to complete, or finish  the next week.

Golden Menorah

Golden Menorah  is a composing activity for Chanukah. Use the same suggestions I posted a few days ago for the composing activity Christmas is Coming.  I wrote words to give students the rhythm so they can concentrate on the melody. Hopefully they suit the occcasion.

I searched the web and there are a lot of Chanukah activities, but I didn’t find any specifically for piano teachers. I am going to try to post another one or two suitable for Chanukah this weekend.

It is late to look for Chanukah music, but for beginning students, I like the books by Bruce Berr, Festive Chanukah Songs and Festive Songs for the Jewish Holidays. The second books is suitable for early elementary students and the first one is a little more difficult. David Karp also has two excellent books for early elementary and late elementary students, Jewish Festival and Folk Songs Books one and two.

Christmas is Coming

Christmas is Coming. The holidays are coming and what can that mean for piano teachers? Sometimes it’s “I didn’t practice this week because _____”. To add to the parties and shopping, my older students have exams next week.

Maybe this might be a good time to work on a composing activity with an elementary student. If you saw yesterday’s post, you recognize these words and the trees. (I like to recycle.)  After the students can say the rhyme in rhythm they are ready to write their melody. Sometimes they will freeze at this point, especially if they have never written any music for you. I usually make up a little example and that seems to relax them. We start on the tonic and I encourage them to end the second measure on the dominant, but of course that all depends on the comfort level and age of your student. However, I insist they end on the tonic. Maybe that’s not being creative and I should encourage a 12 tone row, but somehow the words just don’t move me in that direction.  I’m being silly.  

Getting back to teaching, I have the students write whole notes for the melody first so they can get their melody down quickly.  Then after they are finished we go back and turn them into quarter notes and dotted half notes. This is a pretty open ended worksheet, so if your students are capable, they can write an accompaniment. If a student seems to old for this, but you would like to use it anyway, encourage them to write a song for a younger sibling, or even for one of your younger students. Older students get insulted easily, but if they know that it’s just an exercise in writing a children’s song, they are relieved. You might tell the older student that writing easy music that sounds good is not so easy!

Don’t be discouraged if they start to lose interest and just write any old note to get it finished. This is perfectly natural. Young children have short attention spans, plus, if they really have a talent, they need to go home and doodle with the melody. It’s hard for a creative child to come up with a melody on the spot, but they can sketch out something. Tell them to take it home and erase the parts they don’t like. Remind them to always use a pencil!

Some kids just write notes without even playing them on the piano, showing no interest.  At least they are getting some theory practice and you can discover who really likes to compose.

This activity takes a lot of time if you do it correctly, so it is a great thing to do when a student has nothing prepared to play for you. Let me know how it works for you and any suggestions you may have. If I get a good response, I will make something similar for Valentine’s Day.

Christmas Train

Christmas Train was one of the most time consuming  activities I have made. I wanted to design and draw  a seasonal composing activity to use with very young beginning students. I wanted them to write in  finger numbers for a melody, with the rhythm and words already done for them. I had a design sketched out by hand, and it was easy. But drawing it on the computer proved to be more difficult. If I had made it straight and not curved the text and train cars, it would have been a lot easier. Musically, I probably should have not used 3/4 time, but my mind was stuck on these words.

Here is how I will use it. Tap the rhythm out while saying the words in a 3 meter, accenting the first beat slightly so they feel the meter.  Tap the first line with the RH and the second line with the LH. I call it the green and red hands to match the train engines. Once they start to compose the melody they can use any 5-finger position but be sure you have them start and end on the tonic. (You can tell them that the first note is home and the  trains start and end at home. The bass line can be exactly the same notes as the treble line, but they will discover the finger numbers are different.  This activity will also give them some more finger number practice.   If young children have trouble playing with finger numbers, you know they are not ready for notes.

I designed this for pre-school and kindergarten children, but you can probably use it with first grader, too. This week, I hope to post another paper to put this melody on the staff.