New Prize Ideas
Susan Johannessen on Facebook was mentioning how quickly the “Sticky Hands” disappear from her prize box. I asked her where she got these wonderful little toys and she said they were at the $2 stores in Australia! Well, that’s a bit far for me to travel for a good prize, but I did find them at Amazon and another teacher said you could find them on the prize aisle at Target. I know my boys would love these at any time of year, but I’m going to add them onto my Black Friday Amazon order this weekend! Here are some options from Amazon:
Sticky Lizards 12 for $3
Sticky Lizards
Sticky Hands 72 for $8
Laminating Rhythm Drills
I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me until now, but a great way to save money on printing rhythm drills and Rhythm Menagerie would be to print them on card stock and then laminate them! Then, students cold write on them as needed, give them back with they are through, and you could easily wipe them off and give to another student.
Of course, the down side of this is that students wouldn’t be able to keep the beautiful Rhythm Menagerie pages (what student wants to keep the boring black and white rhythm drills anyway?). But, you could laminate all of the pages besides the Fun with Sounds pages (the ones with the animals on them) and then students could keep their Fun with Sounds animals and certificates.
I am blessed to have a teacher resource center close to where I live so that I can laminate cheaply. But, if I were going to buy a laminator, this Scotch laminator has been recommended to me a number of times and has high reviews on Amazon.
Here are the laminating pouches you’ll need to laminate 8.5 x 11 papers.
Holiday Challenge Update
My students are so excited about the Holiday Sight Reading Challenge I issued a few weeks ago. I love that I can use this idea for sight reading or next year for practice, extra credit challenges, etc. It’s a very versatile incentive program and you can read more about it and download the free materials on the original Sight Reading Challenge post. Here’s a picture of my student’s progress thus far.
When the students color in 5 of the small ornaments, I have them decorate a bigger, 2 inch ornament. They leave this ornament with all the other student’s ornaments on the ledge and I hang them all up at the end of the week.
Holiday Sight Reading Challenge
On the goal setting form I had students fill out in August, many of my students expressed that they wanted to be better sight readers. In the past few months, my students have participated in a Sight Reading Challenge in which every day they practiced I said I would give a certain amount of money to a local charity. I am going to write more about this at another time of year. But, my students were so excited about that challenge that I wanted to do another one from now until Christmas.
Well, I suppose I have to show you the chart on which we kept track of their progress, because it was this chart and their creative decorating of each of their quarters, that gave me an idea for this next Sight Reading Challenge. Look closely at the picture and you will notice their creativity unfold from the left to the right. About half way through the challenge, some of my students even started decorating their quarters like flags, then pumpkins, then all kinds of things!
So, I began thinking that it would be fun for my students to have ornaments that they could decorate. In addition, I always need a little help decorating the studio for Christmas, so I thought that it would be even more fun for them to try to fill one of my walls with bigger ornament that they decorated.
Well, I was right! They are very excited, so I thought I’d share with you how the challenge is working and what they are getting as a result:
- Each student fills in 1 little ornament on the ornament chart for every day that they sight read (see page 2 of the download).
- For every 5 days, they get to decorate a bigger ornament which I will then place on the wall.
- If their wall ornaments reach from one corner of the wall to the other by December 12th, they will get 15 extra minutes of games at their Christmas party on December 19th! (I have carefully measured the wall and each ornament to see how far they should get if each student gets one big ornament a week…the 5 days they are supposed to practice.) The chart of the smaller ornaments on the wall also helps students feel compelled to sight read as they know their peers will notice if they are not keeping up!
You can download the Christmas Ornaments and use them in your own studio (feel free to use them for other challenges besides sight reading). Let me know how you reward your students for sight reading!
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Is Rhythm Menagerie for Private Lessons or Groups?
I’ve been asked this question a few times since the launch of Rhythm Menagerie, so I thought I’d let you know that Rhythm Menagerie was designed to be used in private lessons, though it does work well in groups. Some of the pictures on the video you’ve watched show several groups using the “Fun with Sounds” pages quite effectively, but that is just an example of how flexible we tried to make the curriculum.
Rhythm Menagerie has 8 units and there are 10 pages in each unit. It’s designed so that you can give the student a new rhythm page/activity every week for 10 weeks, yielding a student who really knows their rhythm! The single line rhythm pages (of which there are 3 levels) are designed to simply clap and count out loud, but I often tell my students to get creative with them. The other day, one of my 6 year old students played a little tune on the black key using the rhythms on his Rhythm Menagerie page. Then he placed one hand as far as he could reach on the right side of the keyboard and the other hand as far as he could reach on the left side of the keyboard, then alternated hands playing the measures.
I have an 8 and 6 year old girl doing partner lessons and I told them that I would let them play my resonator bars (from Kindermusik) when they performed their 2-handed rhythm drills the next week. The idea is to be flexible! Your students will think of even more exciting ways to practice than you or I!
So, I apologize if you got the impression from the video that Rhythm Menagerie is for groups! It can certainly be used that way, but it is most effective in the private lesson, giving new rhythms and activities to strengthen your student’s rhythm skills each week.
Visit the Rhythm Menagerie page and the Rhythm Menagerie Tips page for samples of this series. Or buy it now with one click to the checkout:
Read MoreCandy Corn Polyphony
This week, we had our fall group lessons and I had a fun time tweaking our games to go with a fall theme. I had a particularly good time figuring out what to do with my older kids who were studying monophonic, polyphonic, and homophonic music. We also had to do a segment of ear training on 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, and multi-metric meters. A fall theme for these subjects? Yes indeed!
Here’s what we did:
Monophonic, Polyphonic, and Homophonic
With my Level 9 students, I wanted to think of a way to teach these concepts while connecting it to fall. So, I gave each student 3 candy corn. If the sample that I played was
- Monophonic: they would place the candy corn horizontally showing that there was only 1 melody
- Homophonic: they would place one candy corn horizontally and then 2 candy corn vertically underneath the horizontal one to indicate a supporting harmony
- Polophonic: they would place all (or as many voices as they heard) their candy corn horizontally to show different melodies
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