Lesson 2

Be sure to put blue stickers on your piano for the Left Hand. C-F-A. Stress correct fingering of 5-2-1.

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

• Sing and act out Robin Hood with your child — or even better, as a family!
• Find intervals on the keyboard with mini marshmallows, toy cars, legos, etc.
• Have your parent sing while you play, then trade places. Now both sing together!

Homework: pp. 6–7 Students are filling in the crossword puzzle using the music alphabet. Remember, after G comes letter A!

Music Alphabet
“The first 3 notes just happen to be Do Re Mi!” Maria got it right teaching the von Trapp children the solfege before note names. Now that our students can sing, play, and sight read notes through solfege, and keyboard geography is solid, we are getting ready to label all of the white keys on the piano. This begins with the music alphabet! The music alphabet includes the 1st seven notes of the English Alphabet except that it starts on the Letter C and after G comes letter A. The first 7 notes just happen to be C D E F G A B!

Block and Broken
Playing music is like reading a book. We start at the left side of the page and move our eyes to the right. When the note changes, so do our fingers. Help guide this song while sitting on the left of your child and pointing to the notes in each measure. Once your child is comfortable playing the song, practice making sure each measure gets 3 steady beats. Feel free to sing, “RED-2-3; DO (count 1) MI (count 2) SOL (count 3). BLUE-2-3; DO FA LA,” etc…This will help your student understand how to read the music and work towards playing this song with a steady beat.

Snowflakes are Falling
Brrr ... it’s cold outside! Warm up inside your home by playing this ostinato on the tone bells. Sing starting on RE, “Snowflakes are falling, falling very gently”. Then play LA, SOL, FA, MI for “down, down, down, down”. Keep singing the lyrics then repeating this DOWN pattern until you’re feeling toasty inside and finish the song by playing a final DOWN on the RE bell. Try it in a round as a family around the fire with the music album!

Who Am I? I’m the SPIDEY BLUE CHORD!
Spin a chord of fun playing the Left Hand Blue Chord with fingers 5-2-1.