A St. Patrick's Day Game

This is a kind of (read: very) cheesy game that I made up for my students. They LOVED playing it, though. (They are so easy to please!) I loved the fact that it encouraged them to learn their notes so quickly!

Things you will need:

1. Your handy scale blocks
2. This printable gameboard, created by yours truly
3. Leprechaun coins

Note: My Leprechaun coins are not actually from Leprechauns. (Shh! Don't tell my students!) They are actually sequins - 20mm gold sequins created by Darice to be specific. You can, of course substitute whatever you wish, but do not attempt to make Leprechaun coins by painting a bag of small wooden disks with gold acrylic paint. I may have tried this, and I may have lived to regret it.

To Play:

1. Decide which of the following notes you want to reinforce:

• Treble Clef Lines
• Treble Clef Spaces
• Bass Clef Lines
• Bass Clef Spaces

2. Lay out your gameboard, toss all of your scale blocks into a container, and pull out your Leprechaun coins. (Making a great show of the coins as if they are magic is optional, but I prefer it!)

3. Have students draw from the scale blocks, and place their Leprechaun coins on the corresponding rainbow lines or spaces. (i.e. If you decide to reinforce treble clef lines, and the student draws a "B" block, they will place the coin on the third line of the rainbow. Conversely, if you've decided to reinforce bass clef spaces and the student draws a "B" block, they should throw it back in the box and draw another.) Clear as mud?

4. The first line or space to reach the pot of gold (or the line or space with the most coins when time is up) "wins."

Happy Valentine's Day!

I just love Kristin Chenoweth! (And Joshua Bell!)

BTW, if you're like me, and you now have to have this song on your iPod it's available for purchase here as an MP3 Download. Just click the album cover!

'Twas the Lesson Before Christmas...

This week is my last week of lessons this year! Hard to believe, isn't it? I woke up this morning and decided that I wanted to do something special for my students this week, so I chose to do these 5 little things that were a whole lot of fun!

I made up a rule for lessons this week - no lesson books allowed! Instead... We played Christmas songs exclusively and did this fun Light Up The Tree Worksheet by Susan Paradis instead of theory books. (Hint: My kids LOVED using Neon Crayola Twistables instead of the usual colored pencils, because it made the lights "glow")

Of course, what fun would a lesson be without GAMES! I did some surfing online and chose Susan Paradis's Snowflake Keyboard Race, which all of my students absolutely LOVED! (We couldn't just play it once - they requested to play it several times over!) I also downloaded and printed Wendy Stevens's Name That Christmas Tune. I used it as a sight-reading exercise (play it and name the tune). Remarkably, even the kids who are challenging to work with when it comes to sight-reading - enjoyed and were successful at this game! (And those cards aren't exactly easy, either!)

To top off the lesson each student earned a Christmas sticker for their sticker collections (more on that another day) and a candy cane or Christmas cookie.

While I can't make every lesson this fun, it certainly was a fun tradition that I look forward to repeating in the years to come!