Kingswood School Thurs. Oct. 25 11.40-12.40pm

Hi Kingswood!

It was great to meet all of you today. I thought we had a very successful first MusIQ Club class together. We learned a lot!

First we went over the five 'rooms' of the 'Piano Suite' software that we are using:
Piano Player - for learning songs on our keyboards.
Theory Thinker - for learning how music works (the 'science' of music).
Composer's Corner - to create our own songs.
History - to learn about the great composers of the past.
and Games - to have fun and reinforce all the concepts that we learn in the other four subjects.

In our Theory lesson we learned about finger numbers. Thumbs are 1, index fingers are 2, middle fingers are 3, etc... all the way to 5 with our pinky fingers. We also talked about proper hand position and posture for playing the piano. Make sure you practice with curved fingers and sit up nice and tall.

Then we discussed the beat. You were excellent 'beat-keepers' - we practiced clapping along to some fast violin music that I played for you (on CD). Make sure that when you play your piano you keep a steady beat - not speeding up or slowing down. Feel the beat, so that your music will be organized and make sense to the listeners ears.

Finally, we did a lot of exercises naming the 7 letters of the musical alphabet. This was awesome, you were all able to find Middle C, find groups of 2 blacks keys and 3 black keys, and name the keys going all the way up the keyboard.
Practice naming the keys going backwards down the keyboard.

You can try finding, for example, all the A's... or all the F's, the way we did in class, trying to stay in beat. This way you'll get faster and faster at knowing where your white keys are, and you'll become better and better at playing the piano!

Everyone should bring a folder for next time, to keep the song sheets that I hand out at the end of class. I'm looking forward to seeing how you do with the finger number tunes I gave you: Mary had a little lamb and Ode to Joy.

Don't worry if this was a lot to think about in just one week... You can learn at your own pace in this class and I'll be here to help you, so please ask lots of questions.

Thanks for checking out the blog!

Alice