Happy Halloween! My Halloween Festival was last week. Feel free to stop by the studio blog to see pictures: http://www.foxxpianostudio.blogspot.com

This week in the studio I held group lessons so I didn’t have to teach today. Last year for the first time in a very long time I decided for some weird reason to hold group lesson a different week which meant I had to teach on halloween. Never again! I like Halloween just as much as my students and frankly I just didn’t like teaching on Halloween. So if I didn’t like it, you can bet my students would not want to come that day either.

I thought I would share what we did in group class this week.

First, as students arrived I had them do the first two workbook pages of their Piano Olympics book. We will be continuing in this book throughout the year at group, Christmas camp and in lab.

We then played a game of I Have…. Whooo Has?, a fun rhythm game created by Melody Payne. With this game students need to put on their careful listening ears and listen out for the rhythm that was clapped.The nice thing is several of my piano students were familiar how to do this game because they did a different version (non-music) at school. You can find more details about this game in the Plucky Pianista blog store here. 

On to rhythm dictation. Aimee with O For Tuna Orff blog created these great Halloween rhythm dictation slides (quarter and eighth note patterns) and these slides (adding 16th’s).

Students were first shown the first slide…

Then I had them use Wendy Chan’s rhythm flashcards that I won in her giveaway last August to figure the rhythm out. After they were done dictating the rhythm with the flashcards I showed them the answer…

THEN I played the rhythm on the piano with different accents and they added the strong, medium and weak flashcards that are also included in this terrific rhythm flashcard set. These flashcard sets are absolutely stunning and high quality. Included in her blog link is a video showing all that is included in the set and how you can use them with students. Be sure to check it out.

The pictures below will show students using Wendy’s rhythm flashcards dictating from the Halloween slides that were shown.

After rhythm we moved on to notes. First I had each group put together the candy corn note match puzzles created by D’Net Layton. I timed each group on how fast they could correctly put them all together.