Miss Donna 4 Music

I’ve always liked the thought of adding games into my lessons. When I taught lessons in-person, I would add a few on occasion. But it was never a priority. I like to make lists of things to do and then check off the items as I accomplish them. And that translated over into my teaching. We had to get to all the “important” things first and maayyybe we’d get to a game every 5 or 6 months.

Now that I teach only online, it has become even more important to make that personal connection with my students. And using games is a great way to do this. They reinforce what we’re learning in our books and sometimes present the concepts in a new way that make them easier to grasp and understand. And it helps keep the fun in the learning.

For 2022, I have purposed to play a game at the end of each lesson and each month the games will have a different theme. For the month of January, the theme was Intervals. I used two games for this. First, we started with a game called Step, Skip, Repeat. It has a Christmas/Winter theme. This resource was created by Kate Thompson and is available for purchase on My Music Resource. Its a very simple game that requires at least 2 players. It can be teacher and student or you could have a parent join in or a sibling, or it would work great for buddy lessons. The student is shown a card and they have to say whether it is showing a step, a skip, or a repeat. If they are correct, a repeat earns them 1 space forward, a step earns 2 spaces, and a skip earns 3 spaces.

The 2nd game for January was Mitten Mismatch. This game was created by Nicola Cantan from Vibrant Music Teaching. To access the games, you have to sign up for a membership but it is well worth it for the fun and easy to print-and-play resources. You can sign up here or you can check out her blog called Colorful Keys, which has lots of great videos and podcasts available for free. You can also find Colorful Keys on YouTube.

For Mitten Mismatch, the students have to match an interval on the staff to and interval on the piano keys. Since the notes on the staff do not include a clef sign they aren’t necessarily tied to specific letters. The students just have to count the lines and spaces of the staff and then count the keys on the piano. If they are the same number, they get a match and a point. This can be played with a single player or with 2 players as stated above.

While both of these games are slightly piano focused, they could easily work for other instruments or singers as well. Stay tuned to see what themed games we are playing for February!!