Lesson #11

Placement of all 9 stickers!

We learned the Blue Chord this week. Please place the Blue Chord Stickers on your keyboard or piano on the notes C-F-A.

It is VERY important that your child is using fingers 1-3-5 to play the Blue Chord! The thumb is an anchor (glued) on Middle C and the rest of the hand shifts up a baby step.

In class we colored the chords in Primary Chord Song and Blue Sky to help distinguish the notation of each chord. (Please help them finish coloring them at home if they didn't finish in class. The notes don't need to be filled in perfectly, just the right colors so they can be identified quickly.) Please be sure to have your child practice playing these songs to get confident in the chord changes. We want them to be able to do it with their eyes closed in a few weeks!

Celebrate Connection   
A few ideas to bring playfulness to practice time!

• Play a duet with your parent. Place your hands an octave higher or lower.
• Play your song as *piano* (quiet) as you can.
• Balance an object on your head while you play.

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.

 You can reinforce building "turtle shell" intervals all over the staff by making intervals with black notes on the Student Magnet Board.
    
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!
    
Fill in any of the ideas below with the musical focus of choice, whatever needs a little more practice. Ideas include: red, blue or yellow chord, specific intervals, different melodic patterns, specific notes, Middle C’s, rat-tat-tats, steps or skips, different bugs (slug, beetle), etc.
    
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!