This week, we had our fall group lessons and I had a fun time tweaking our games to go with a fall theme. I had a particularly good time figuring out what to do with my older kids who were studying monophonic, polyphonic, and homophonic music. We also had to do a segment of ear training on 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, and multi-metric meters. A fall theme for these subjects? Yes indeed!
Here’s what we did:
Monophonic, Polyphonic, and Homophonic
With my Level 9 students, I wanted to think of a way to teach these concepts while connecting it to fall. So, I gave each student 3 candy corn. If the sample that I played was
- Monophonic: they would place the candy corn horizontally showing that there was only 1 melody
- Homophonic: they would place one candy corn horizontally and then 2 candy corn vertically underneath the horizontal one to indicate a supporting harmony
- Polophonic: they would place all (or as many voices as they heard) their candy corn horizontally to show different melodies
Meter
To help my students distinguish triple, quadruple, compound, and multi-metric meter, I gave each of them 5 fall colored Hershey’s Kisses. Here is how they indicated what they heard:
- 3/4 – Obviously, they put 3 kisses forward
- 4/4 – 4 kisses forwards
- 6/8 – 2 kisses forward, after reviewing that 6/8 really gets 2 beats, not 6
- Multi-metric – All kisses forward to indicate changing meters.
Of course these were simple and somewhat silly things to do, but it helped visually represent what they were learning.
Melodic Dictation
I’ve added Level 6 and Level 7 melodic dictation using Thanksgiving melodies. Just click on Level 6 or Level 7, and scroll down until you see the Melodic Dictation setting. Students and teachers can print the melodic dictation worksheet and even listen to the dictation online (yes, it even repeats itself 4 times). In our group lessons, I actually did this with a group of Level 6 and Level 9 students together. My Level 9 students needed to review the easier melodic dictation (steps and skips in the tonic triad), so having them do the Level 7 worksheet worked out just finte. When we did this in our group lessons and I gave any student who could “name the tune” an extra piece of fall candy.
If you use this and want the answer sheet, just email me!
Younger Student Fall Games
For my younger kids, we used candy corn pumpkins on their Grand Staffs to work on intervals, notes, etc. We also used candy corn with brown tips to represent minor and candy corn with white tips to represent major. We did ear training activities with these, but could also have done something with this and triad identification.
A fun little activity I did with my 2 kids in partner lessons was to place a small pumpkin at the top of my stairs. The two girls stood in front of the white board in my downstairs studio where we had placed their Rhythm Menagerie page. I started counting off “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, ready, go.” When I said “go,” one of the girls started clapping the rhythm and counting out loud. The other had to run up to the top of the stairs, get the pumpkin, and bring it back to the piano bench before the other girl completed 1 line of rhythm with repeat. Then the next girl would take the pumpkin back while the other clapped and counted. They had a lot of fun doing this out of the ordinary activity. If they had been older and we had more time, I would have set a nice beat on the Clavinova and told them to do this activity and exchange places without missing a beat.
How do you adapt group activities for a fall theme?
