Green Turtle Shells Lesson 11

We Learned the Blue Chord this week. Place Blue Chord Stickers on C-F-A. If you don’t have these stickers anymore, I always keep extras pinned to the board by the front door, so grab some next week. You should have Red, Blue, and Yellow stickers on your piano now, for the right hand.

Be sure your child is using fingers 1-3-5 for the red, and ALSO for the blue, the thumb is an anchor on Middle C and the rest of the hand shifts up a baby step. The YELLOW chord is the only one that uses 1-2-5 and it is critical they are really solid in that. Practice with them several times this week to reinforce the fingerings. Now is the time for good habits to be established. It is MUCH harder to undo a bad habit than it is to establish a good habit.

Color the chords in Primary Chord Song and Blue Sky to help distinguish the notation of each chord.

Turtle Shells

We will continue to reinforce to your Green Turtle Shell that intervals can show up anywhere on the staff and be played anywhere on the keyboard! Have fun playing an interval game with any two objects by creating an interval and asking your child what it is and then inviting them to play it on the keyboard. Ideas of objects to use: coins, counters, erasers, cereal, candies, Legos, rocks, etc.

Echo Edna

Echo Edna gave each child their own ‘secret code’ (using steps and skips) to ‘decipher’ (sight read) on the magnet board. We used our laser beam eyes to solve the code while playing it on the keyboards at the same time!

Now that we are more comfortable with keyboard geography, hand position, how to build chords notated and on the piano, we are ready to keep our eyes on the book and not look down at our fingers while we play each of the songs in the songbook! We’ve already introduced Laser Beam Eyes. Here are some other fun ways to keep our eyes on the book while we practice! Don’t forget parents to follow the notes with your finger and sing along with your child!

1. Keep your eye on the (rat-tat-tats).
2. (Insert Child’s Name), time to turn on your Laser Beam Eyes while we play Blue Sky!
3. Freeze Ray the Middle C’s with your freeze vision!
4. I’ve got my eye on (the steps in Echo Edna)!
5. I’m watching you Yellow Chords. Always watching, always!

For my convenience, I have preloaded content for the whole semester. I will update each future post with specific time-sensitive info before I send the link each week. If you choose to read ahead you might see details that don’t apply to your child’s class. For this reason I do not recommend reading ahead. Thank you!