Let’s Get Started
Let’s Chant
At-Home Activity
Hold the sustain pedal (on the right-hand side) of your piano to make snowy sounds and watery sounds. Create pieces that sound like snow, rain, or water.
Let’s Sing
“Snowflakes”
From Keyboard Games Book A, pg. 16
Description:
- Dynamics: Soft
- Tempo: A little slow
- Meter: Triple (Du-da-di Du-da-di)
- Piano Keys Used: Two white keys (SO-DO sound)
- Keyboard Register: High
- Hands: Two hands play separately, with each hand moving
- Technique: Arm movement using the middle finger
Note: Improvisation cements learning. Students are learning short manageable musical fragments and then cementing that learning by using those musical ideas and rhythm patterns in new ways. This is similar to how children learn to speak their native language(s), first babbling with sounds, then forming those sounds into one-word utterances, then stringing words together into thoughts until they can eventually converse.
Bonus!
Choose your favorite pieces to create a medley and give the medley a fun title!
From the Author
Following are some of the major concepts of this approach:
- Creativity is fostered by using different elements of music, such as rhythm, pitch, harmony, and form to create something new.
- Improvisation activities apply everything a student learns. Use familiar patterns from folk songs, transpose, change tonality and meter, create variations and medley, and create melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variations.
- Perform with technical freedom. Students learn how to use the playing apparatus from the beginning of lessons.