Picking Great Action Songs for your Educational Music Games
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010Teaching music to children can be a very challenging task since kids have very short attention span. If children in your class are bored they will quickly get fidgety and disruptive to the rest of the class. If you use your creativity in music classes like this you’ll quickly become a very effective teacher. Using [...]
Substitute Lesson ideas – Musical Bingo
Monday, March 22nd, 2010For an emergency substitute lesson I have 2 bingo games. Both are purchased games with game cards and a CD. One game is made up of musical instrument sounds and the other is sound we hear around us. I use the instruments bingo for grades 2 -4 and the sounds bingo for [...]
Classroom Music Games – Music Treasure Hunt
Saturday, March 20th, 2010Select 4 contrasting instruments (any that you like…for example a scraping sound, a hitting sound, a shaking sound and a pitched percussion or barred instrument) Each instrument will represent a sound (left, right, forward, backward). Practice moving around the room to the sounds. Choose 4 students to play instruments, 1 to be the “treasure hunter” [...]
Classroom Music Games – The Note Bucket Game
Friday, March 19th, 2010
Make up a series of large cards with a music notes or symbols that the class are currently learning, and tape them to a series of buckets.
Then set the buckets up in front of the class and make a line with tape on the floor about five (5) feet from the buckets or less [...]
Classroom Games – Playing Musical Words
Thursday, March 18th, 2010Using manuscript on a whiteboard draw up notes that spell out a word: (eg. “edge”, “dad”, “face”, “cabbage” etc..) one point is first allocated to a student or team who correctly identifies the word.
Then you can get the students to ‘play’ the word on an instrument. The first to accurately play the notes in [...]
Making a lesson plan fun for young music students
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010If you’ve been a teacher of young children’s classes you’ll know one very important thing: you always need have a lesson plan. That is, if you want to end the day in a positive frame of mind!
A lesson plan doesn’t have to be complex, and teachers who have been in the game a while can [...]
Using Computer games to learn music?
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010Remember old fashioned piano lessons? Where you had to go to Mrs Jones’s house and sit up straight on the stool, and play the right notes or you’d get a swift ruler tap on the back of the knuckles?
Well thankfully times have changed, and (we hope) that piano teachers no longer plan to teach with [...]
Classroom Music Game – Moving To Musical Notation
Monday, March 15th, 2010I tried something different with my beginners a while ago – ages 7 – 8yrs and they enjoyed it. I drew semibreves, minims, dotted minims, crothchets and crotchet rests on the board in random order. They had to walk forward a step and count 4 for the semibreve, 3 for dotted minim etc and no [...]
Classroom Music Games – Dice Rhythm Game
Monday, March 15th, 2010Find some small round tokens, about the size of a large coin. On each token draw or print a combination of notes…i.e. 3 quarter notes, a whole note, a dotted half plus a whole…any combination up to a value of 10. Create approximately 50 tokens, with values from 1 count to 10 counts.
To play the [...]
Teaching the Cello and Double bass in the music classroom
Saturday, March 13th, 2010Here are a few simple classroom games you can play to help your students learn about the cello and double bass in the music classroom.
Learning about the parts of the instruments is easy if you play this game: play Pin the Parts on the Cello or or Double Bass (a variation on Pin the Tail [...]