Treble Clef Ornaments

I love this time of the year especially the days leading up to Christmas. The snow (although it's only been a day of light flurries so far in Surrey), the Christmas tunes always bring around a warm fuzzy feeling. 

Around the studio, the students are making Treble Clef ornaments from shiny pipe cleaners and colourful beads, a craft activity that is inexpensive and nicely doubles up as a practice incentive. Students have been collecting a bead for each day of practice from 2 weeks ago. 

This is the second year we're making the treble ornaments and I love how beautiful they look on the Christmas trees. I thought it would be fun this year to trade treble clef ornaments with other students from the studio. This week, we'll be making the treble clef ornaments in class and students will be dropping the ornaments in a basket. They will each collect an ornament at the Christmas recital to take home for their tree.

I'm excited to experiment with other musical symbols from the shiny pipe cleaners and beads, will share a photo if I am successful :) 

Holly Jolly Rhythms- Background for iPad

With Christmas and the holiday season approaching, I've had fun creating another background for the whiteboard app on the iPad. Just curious, is anyone using an Android tablet and is there a similar whiteboard app available? Quite sure there are more with Android. 

I'm excited that students can get creative with rhythms to get ready for composing in January. Hope you have fun with the backgrounds (available for 2/4, 3/4,/ 4/4 and 6/8 time signatures)

And the winner is......

Katie Kelting from Arizona! Katie, please contact me at pianoescapades@gmail.com and send me your mailing address.

Thank you all who entered the draw for the Cutie Critter Rhythm Spinner giveaway. I really enjoyed learning about your favourite teaching aids and appreciate all the wonderful comments and kind words!

Be sure to follow MyTeachingAide on Facebook to learn about future giveaways, new products, promotions and teaching aid ideas..

My Little Triads And Inversions Teacher

Ever since the Major Minor Faces video, I've felt very inspired to create short instructional videos by students themselves to demonstrate specific exercises, concepts and technique at the piano. This adds to the fun in learning and I'm excited how this project will motivate the students to keep their focus and encouraged them to articulate what they know. When I announced my plans for this project, the students all seemed just ecstatic about the opportunity to see themselves on videos. Not only will students be performing their favourite pieces but they will also take on another role as teachers! I think it's so rewarding to see these students mastering the concepts and then relating back in their own words their understanding of these concepts and subsequently "teach" their peers. 

I promised to share another clip so here's a first video featuring my little Triads and Inversions teacher demonstrating how he figures out the notes to play for the root position, 1st and 2nd inversion triads. Can't wait to work on more!