I love my laminator! Its one of the best investments I’ve made for my teaching! Its fun to do, it preserves my manipulatives and visual aids, and anything you laminate instantly becomes a white board surface!
Since I have now starting teaching all my private lessons virutally, I knew I would need more visual aids and printables to use for my students. One of the things I thought would be especially helpful for my young piano students (and can be used with adults too) is a picture of a piano keyboard. So I printed off a page and laminated it (of course). And then I began to think of all the ways I could use it in the lessons, and if I was able to have my students print one off and laminate theirs, I began to think of all the ways they could use it at home! We could really have a lot of fun with this!
To start off, we can look at all the patterns of black keys and white keys. In our first lesson, we learn about how the black keys come in groups of 2’s and 3’s. On our keyboard chart, using dry erase markers, we can easily find each group and circle them. Some of the keyboards on the page I created don’t have the black keys colored in, so the student can do that themselves. Maybe we color groups of 3 in red and groups of 2 in purple.
We can also find and label the entire music alphabet! Multiple times even! We can label hand positions (check out my post about my piano hand position charts) with letters and finger numbers. We can write out scales and chords, again with letters and finger numbers. And I’m sure a host of other things, I haven’t even thought of yet. This could be a really valuable tool for a piano student of any age or level. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find a use for it for my voice students or flute students!
Miss Donna 4 Music 