Shamrock Gem Winners

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Giveaway Contest this week! After looking through all the gems I made last weekend, I decided to give out two sets of gems. Congratulations to the winners below – I’ll send an email to the account provided in the comments. (If for some reason you do not receive the email, please contact me at info@sarasmusicstudio.com.)

Check out Kristi’s idea about using dice to teach scales and fingering. Love it!

#15: fraurab: Yesterday we played Susan Paradis’ St. Patrick’s game with two of my students. It’s nice because we could play with the same board game and the cards were at two different levels. Last week we did colored “musical” glasses, where I filled six glasses full of water (with coloring of course!)

#21: Kristi: Your post gave me the nudge to finally round up some kind of manipulative to help show how to build scales and inversions. As an interim fix, I got some dice out of my game cupboard — even finding two smaller ones to use for the half steps. (nice visual enhancement!) Feeling clever, and wishing the numbers on the dice went to 8 so we could use them to count the tones (the numbers WILL help for discussing the primary chords, but I’m planning to use the green dice I found for that.) I set them out for one of my students. He immediately built a new scale and then exclaimed, “this is so cool, because I can use the dice to show the fingering at the same time! I guess six is going to waste….” Suddenly, figuring out the fingering from “4th on B-flat” is piece of cake. The second big thing I learned was to have him then play the scale an octave up or down from the dice so he could use them as a road map. BIG bonus — he stopped trying to count the first tone as a whole step. I’ve also used this with adult students this week to great success. Slow to see the light, but late is better than never! Thanks.

I’ll be doing more Giveaways in the future, so if you didn’t win this time around, stay tuned!