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

Westmount Elementary School Tues. Oct 23 12.15-1.15pm

We had a wonderful time in Musiq Club today.

Each of you worked extremely well, and I'm very proud of how much we've accomplished already.

You remembered the names of all the notes, including Middle C.
You remembered that there are high notes on the right side of the piano, and low notes on the left side.
You even remembered all kinds of things about Mr. Beethoven - our lesson teacher; he was deaf, he played the piano, he wrote beautiful music and he was a German!

Today we learned about two new songs: One by Beethoven called "Fur Elise" and another one by Grieg called "In the Hall of the Mountain King".

After playing some note naming games and practicing our songs from last week, we visited the improvisation room and I was very impressed with how all of you were able to make your own recordings with various instruments and styles of music.
Some of you have an excellent sense of rhythm. (Lily - that waltz was amazing!)

Keep practicing your musical alphabet with a good round hand position, and find all the keys for each letter, keeping a steady beat.

Nice work girls. I'm looking forward to learning more about rhythm (and new games) with you next week!

P.S. Here is a picture of you 5 from the first week. Parents, if you'd rather not have your child's photo here on the blog just let me know, and I can take it down asap.

Fleming Tower Elementary School Mon. Oct 22 2.15-3.15pm

Great class this week everyone.

We learned about rhythm today. Rhythm is when there are long sounds and short sounds in music, overtop of a steady beat.
There is a natural rhythm in language, when we talk. So we played a game making up sentences like "I like kitty cats" and "My sister eats cake".
The words with two syllables have short sounds and the words with only one have long sounds.
We practiced clapping lots of different sentences, and everyone seemed to understand after visiting Mr. Beethoven and Ms. Melody to reinforce the concepts.

We tried out the Princess Game, which was pretty hard for some students, but others picked it up right away.

Everyone can practice making up sentences and playing the rhythms on middle C on their keyboards at home.

I was very glad to see that everyone remembered their musical alphabet perfectly, and was able to find Middle C. Practice saying the alphabet backwards. We want to know our keys so well that we can name each of them quickly, without having to counting up and down.

We'll learn more about rhythm next time. Thanks for all your hard work :)
See you next week.