Lesson 11

Next week is Showtime for Song of Joy. Students can choose their favorite part of the song to play for me — just 4–8 measures please! Send me a video via text or Marco Polo. Thanks!

I enjoyed watching each student play their 'bug' scale hands together this week! Encourage your child to keep practicing. No one played it 'perfectly,' so everyone will benefit from continuing to practice. Also, be sure to start using a metronome when your child practices. This will help them keep a steady beat — a skill that is critical to being a top notch musician! Students can also play along with the accompaniment tracks (#14–37 on the album) to keep a steady beat.

We are continuing to work on absolute pitch and relative pitch by singing middle C and then finding F from it. We also played Let's Play Music and Turkey in the Straw in the key of F. F position is coming easily now! These kiddos will be transposing so easily due to their interval and solfege understanding and execution!

In class we started taking melodic dictation. I played a few musical notes, and the students had to listen and figure out what they were hearing, then decode how it should be written. We will continue developing this aural perception skill throughout the rest of the school year.

We also played a little bit of Twinkle, Twinkle (pg.22) : As we start to play this first theme, remind your student to stretch their right hand into the "Blue Chord" position to touch 'G' with finger 4, and 'A' with finger 5. Then when coming back down, slide your thumb from 'D' to 'C', and you'll be back in C position again!

Homework: p. 40–41 Students practice drawing Red, Blue, and Yellow Chords in their HW Booklet. Then they need to play the melody of Jingle Bells to determine which chord should be played in each measure and write in the chords on the blank bass staff. Wow! What great ear training!

Turkey in the Straw
This repertoire piece will have us playing the melody in the right hand and NOW the left hand as well. It will also give us another opportunity to practice our transposing. Your student is doing some pretty impressive stuff!

Thanksgiving will be here before you know it. Our Let's Play Music Blog has some fun ideas for a few Turkey extras your whole family can enjoy!

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!