Yellow Arrows Lesson 2

-Put Blue Stickers on Piano for Left Hand. C-F-A. It is critical you help reinforce the proper fingering – it is NOT the same as RH.

Celebrate Connection

A few ideas to bring playfulness to practice time!

• Sing and act out Robin Hood with your child, even better, as a family!
• Find intervals on the keyboard with mini marshmallows, toy cars, legos, etc.
• Have your parent sing while you play, the trade places. Now both sing together!

Music Alphabet
“The first 3 notes just happen to be Do Re Mi!” Maria got it right teaching the von Trap children the solfege before note names. Now that our students can sing, play, and sight read notes through solfege, and keyboard geography is solid, we are getting ready to label all of the white keys on the piano. This begins with the music alphabet! The music alphabet includes the 1st seven notes of the English Alphabet except that it starts on the Letter C and after G comes letter A. The first 7 notes just happen to be C D E F G A B!

Block and Broken
Playing music is like reading a book. We start at the left side of the page and move our eyes to the right. When the note changes, so do our fingers. Help guide this song while sitting on the left of your child and pointing to the notes in each measure. Once your child is comfortable playing the song, practice making sure each measure gets 3 steady beats. Feel free to sing, “RED-2-3; DO (count 1) MI (count 2) SOL (count 3). BLUE-2-3; DO FA LA,” etc…This will help your student understand how to read the music and work towards playing this song with a steady beat.

Snowflakes are Falling
Brrr it’s cold outside! Warm up inside your home by playing this ostinato on the tone bells. Sing starting on Re, “Snowflakes are falling, falling very gently”. Then play La, Sol, Fa, Mi for “down, down, down, down”. Keep singing the lyrics then repeating this DOWN pattern until you’re feeling toasty inside and finish the song by playing a final DOWN on the Re bell. Try it in a round as a family around the fire with the cd!

Who Am I? I’m the SPIDEY BLUE CHORD!

Spin a chord of fun playing the Left Hand Blue Chord with LH fingers 5-2-1.

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!