Musik & Me – Featuring Lets Play Music and Sound Beginnings

Please watch this week how your students’ mastery of Melodic Patterns and Chord Fingerings are going. I am seeing some fingering confusion and habits that will be hard to break the longer they practice them incorrectly. Focus and encourage lots of Red, Blue, and Yellow chord transitions this week, with both right and left hands separately.

Celebrate Connection

A few ideas to bring playfulness to practice time!

• When the notes go up the keyboard, lean to the right; when the notes go down, lean to the left.
• Sing along in pig-latin
• Play (and sing) a song as *Forte* as you can!

Registration for next semester is right around the corner! I’ll be holding free preview classes in just a couple weeks for new families to see what Let’s Play Music is all about. Please help me spread the word… I do give referral bonuses! Please feel free to sign up for a free preview class if you ever had to miss a class. (It’s the closest thing to having a make-up class that I’m allowed to do!) Classes are always more fun with experienced families, even if the kids are a little older!

Do you have another child that is going to be 4 years old by September 1st? Sign up for a Let’s Play Music free preview class for them!

Do you have another child that is 0-4 years old that would benefit from Sound Beginnings? You’re welcome to sign up for a free preview class for that as well!

Melodic Patterns
We get to PLAY all of the melodic patterns this week! The value of this daily practice technique is to SEE, SING and PLAY each pattern all at once. Though their well-trained ears might tempt them to play each pattern by ear, insist they look at the book with their goggles, binoculars, laser beam eyes, telescopic vision, x-ray vision, heat vision, freeze vision, or night vision eyes while they play and sing!      
       
Here are the verbal cues we sing in class with our hand signs. Invite them to sing these cues, finger numbers, or be creative and make up different words on the pitches of each melodic pattern.

• MRD – Baby Steps Down 
• SFMRD – Baby Steps Go-Ing Down  
• SMD – Skip-Ping Down  
• SSD – Same Same Leap-up  
• SLTD – Baby Steps Going Up

In case you missed it, I have created this printable Melodic Patterns Matching Game. This has all 5 melodic patterns in it. You may use whichever cards you wish (as long as there is a match). Any card that has the same pattern is a match (see picture example). The simplest way to make this game is to print on thick paper (or even regular paper) and cut them out. You can laminate them if you wish. Better yet, they fit perfectly on business card paper so you can just print, fold, and tear apart! Be sure you and your child sing ♫ each pattern as you turn the cards over!

Can’t Bug Me
Drumroll please…..Introducing BEAT BUG! “The BEAT is the BUG and the others play a long!” The Beat Bug sets the tempo on the metronome! He might go fast or slow but the beat is a ‘bug’ (quarter note) and the other rhythms (beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers, butterflies, slugs) follow and fit within that given tempo. 

Hickory Dickory Dock
This song introduces parallel motion by following a steady beat through a metronome (a tick-tock is what we’ll call this motion in class).      

Lullaby and Goodnight & Go to Sleep
After we solidify the chord transitions in our lullabies, we will make them sound more serene and calming by stylizing them with broken chords. Feel free to invite your child to color the chords in their piano book to make this an easier transition.

Primary Chord Song/Primary Cadence
Time to put on a show for the family! Your child can play ALL chords with BOTH HANDS! Invite them to perform the chords while singing the chords out loud! Play them hands separate, then try hands together with the correct fingerings!

Why the importance of chords in piano playing? Kristi Ison, a Let’s Play Music teacher in Mesa, Arizona, shares the Top 10 Reasons for Learning Primary Chords!