Lesson #6

How are your students doing on their mastery of Melodic Patterns and Chord Fingerings? It gets super busy in the spring with soccer and baseball and dance (etc...), so if we can catch them now, we will have a bit more time to focus on correcting or helping your child. Please let me know if there are any questions or concerns about those important foundational skills. I have tricks up my sleeve if they're needed. :)

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

• - When the notes go up the keyboard, lean to the right; when the notes go down, lean to the left.
• - Sing along in pig-latin
• - Play (and sing) a song as *Forte* as you can!

Melodic Patterns

We get to PLAY all of the melodic patterns this week! The value of this daily practice technique is to SEE, SING and PLAY each pattern all at once. Though their well-trained ears might tempt them to play each pattern by ear, insist they look at the book with their goggles, binoculars, laser beam eyes, telescopic vision, x-ray vision, heat vision, freeze vision, or night vision eyes while they play and sing!

Here are the verbal cues we sing in class with our hand signs. Invite them to sing these cues, finger numbers, or be creative and make up different words on the pitches of each melodic pattern.
MRD-Baby Steps Down
SFMRD-Baby Steps Going Down
SMD-Skip-Ping Down
SSD- Same Same Leap-up
SLTD-Baby Steps Going Up

Can’t Bug Me

Drumroll please…..Introducing BEAT BUG! “The BEAT is the BUG and the others play a long!” The Beat Bug sets the tempo on the metronome! He might go fast or slow but the beat is a ‘bug’ (quarter note) and the other rhythms (beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers, butterflies, slugs) follow and fit within that given tempo.

Lullaby and Goodnight & Go to Sleep

After we solidify the chord transitions in our lullabies, we will make them sound more serene and calming by stylizing them with broken chords. Feel free to invite your child to color the chords in their piano book to make this an easier transition.

Primary Chord Song/Primary Cadence

Time to put on a show for the family! Your child can play ALL chords with BOTH HANDS! Invite them to perform the chords Ray Charles style while singing the chords out loud! Play them hands separate, then try hands together with the correct fingerings!

Why the importance of chords in piano playing? Kristi Ison, a Let’s Play Music teacher in Mesa, Arizona, shares the Top 10 Reasons for Learning Primary Chords!