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The second ICYMI episode is here! – A Piano Safari stuffed animal shopping guide to help you build your own collection to support this method.
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Items Mentioned and Other Related Content
Piano Safari Stuffed Animal Shopping Guide
Piano Safari Animal Techniques (these are also included in Repertoire book 1)
Piano Safari Repertoire Book 1
An Assignment Sheet for Piano Safari
What Do You Use After Piano Safari 3
Piano Safari Pattern Pieces, Book 1
Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe
Keys at Play, Book 1 by Joy Morin
Tales of a Musical Journey by Irina Gorin
Transcript
Welcome to episode 126 of The Piano Pantry Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Chaplin, creator of Piano Pantry, a website dedicated to serving this independent teacher community since 2016.
If you’re new around here, welcome! On this podcast, we talk about all things teacher life-related, from organizing your studio to getting dinner on the table and all that comes between.
Today’s episode is the second ICYMI episode I’ve done on this show. If you’re unsure what ICYMI stands for, it means “In Case You Missed It.” The first episode featured free student award programs made available to members of Music Teachers National Association – MTNA.
For our second feature, I’m excited to highlight a resource on the Piano Pantry blog for teachers who use the Piano Safari method, including a stuffed animal shopping guide.
Let’s get going.
Hey, friends! Before we dive in, I thought I should mention the elephant in the room.
That was total coincidence, by the way, that I mentioned elephants when we’re about to talk about stuffed animals, Ha! Anyway,
For those of you who have been around here for a while, I’m sure you noticed that the podcast has new theme music! Knowing me, you probably figured I was just ready to change it up after 125 episodes, but that’s actually not the case.
It’s a technology thing.
So, when I started this podcast, I was using Anchor.fm as my podcast distributor, which was owned by Spotify. I loved it because they had recording tools built in that was so easy to use including access to free theme music. Some time ago, Spotify dropped the name Anchor.fm and became Spotify for Podcasters. Earlier this year, they announced they were no longer going to provide recording tools which meant no more theme music.
Yes… sigh.
I did soooo much digging trying to find a way to keep my same theme music. Funnily enough, my theme music was called The Zeppelin. As you can imagine, every time I tried to Google it, all I got was search results on Led Zeppelin. LOL.
Anyway, I’m just embracing the forced change since I do like mixing things up around here and I hope you enjoy our new music moving forward.
OK, so let’s talk about resources for Piano Safari!
First of all, if you’re unfamiliar with Piano Safari, it’s one of the newest methods. Funnily enough, I started using it in its earliest days – maybe back as early as 2010 – because at least one of the authors – maybe both – but at the time, I only knew of one – went to grad school with someone I did my undergrad with.
My initial draw was their fun and unique approach to teaching techniques through animals. They also connect the animals to rhythm patterns. All of the animal techniques are available as a separate book and are also included in Method Book 1.
Just a quick disclaimer here that this is not a paid ad by Piano Safari – this is just something I’m sharing with you of my own accord that I’ve found useful and thought you might find useful as well.
By the way, this podcast remains ad-free thanks to the support of teacher friends like you on Patreon including one of my newest members, Laura C of Cardinal Music. Thanks, Laura, for partnering with me to publish this work! You too can join for as little as $4 a month at PianoPantry.com/patreon.
OK, so here’s the rundown of what the animal techniques are like.
The first one in the book – the Lion Paw, is designed to help students learn how to use arm weight with a forte sound.
Next up is Zechariah Zebra, which is designed to be played with firm fingertips, good hand shape, and fast, repeated notes while maintaining relaxed, non-playing fingers.
Tall Giraffe focuses on non-legato articulation with an arm bounce on each note and a down-up wrist motion
The kangaroo uses similar techniques to Zechariah Zebra: a bouncy arm, firm fingertips, and an up-wrist motion on the last big beat.
Tree frog teaches them to play legato – coordinating an engaged, bouncy arm on each note to connected fingers.
A Monkey is used for learning rotation of the forearm, keeping the hand up over the keys, playing with the thumb on its corner, and then also working on weight transfer.
Lastly, Soaring Bird is designed to teach three-note slurs with one arm motion.
So… e ach animal technique has a technique piece as well as a rote piece related to it.
About 10 years ago, I started using Piano Safari almost exclusively and wanted to build up a collection of little creatures as props to help make the experience more fun and interactive.
I remember asking the authors initially where they got their animals, pretty well ended up looking on my own. and I’ll tell you what – it was quite the chore building the collection without spending lots of money because stuffed animals can be expensive!
Anyway, it was such an effort for me, I wanted to try and make it easier for others so I wrote a whole blog post sharing links to all the animals I found in a blog post on the Piano Pantry website.
If you’re interested in building up a collection, definitely check out that list as a starting point at least.
That blog post also includes a freebie download of some of my tips related to teaching Piano Safari.
You can get the link to this post in the show notes, or just Google “Piano Pantry Piano Safari stuffed animals,” and it will come right up or you can visit the show notes directly at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode126
A few of the animals aren’t related to technique motions directly but are props for some of the early Rote pieces in the book including Charlie Chipmunk and Herbie Hippo. Kids just absolutely love it when I break these out. You can even embrace the kid in yourself and have a little fun using the animals to pretend like they’re talking to the kids about playing the piece like…
Have the little chipmunk bounce to the beat while the child plays or tell him in a chipmunk voice how much Charlie loved hearing them play his song. Kids absolutely love this.
As far as ages go, I mostly break out the animals with kids younger than 10 but sometimes older elementary kids enjoy seeing them. You just have to feel each student out. Sometimes I leave them sitting out on the piano and see if they say anything or get intrigued by them.
Now, just to be completely transparent, I do not use Piano Safari exclusively anymore like I did in the early days. I do use it a bit here and there, but I’m not as hot and heavy on it as I was 10 years ago. I still use Pattern Pieces Book 1 a lot—almost with every student—and the repertoire books randomly here and there.
I know your burning question now is what I use, so I’ll indulge you quickly—I used Marilyn Lowe’s Music Moves for Piano books a lot in the early days. Sometimes, I do those alongside Irina Gorin’s Tales of a Musical Journey books but more recently I’ve started using more of Joy Morin’s new Keys at Play, Book 1. I also like the Piano Adventures Book 1, but I don’t really use the Primer although once in awhile I’ll pull out some of their landmark songs randomly.
I still love all of these animal technique songs, though, and, as I said, many of the Piano Pattern books. Don’t forget you can get some of my best tips from my years of using Piano Safari A LOT in a free download inside of the Piano Safari Stuffed Animals Shopping Guide post.
I have a fun life tip for you today, but first, I wanted to let you know that registration will be opening soon for the Summer intensive session of my digital organization course, which will be held August 5-7 from 10 am-1 pm Eastern time.
In this course, we will look at six key areas of our daily digital work landscape, including file management and email. Start your year with the backend of your business reset and refreshed and ready to go. Be sure you’re on my email list to get notified at PianoPantry.com/subscribe or follow me on social media at Piano Pantry – on Instagram I’m PianoPantryAmy.
Before we go today I wanted to share a little tip with you. Have you ever tried English cucumbers? They’re also called hothouse or seedless cucumbers and are the long, skinny ones, sometimes individually wrapped at the grocery. I had a friend recently who had never had them and after trying them said she would never go back to regular old cucumbers which are really seedy. I’m the same.
I like using a peeler to remove just a few strips of cucumber skin before slicing them into thick coins for veggie trays. They look really pretty that way. Don’t peel the whole thing; just 4-6 little strips around the perimeter.
Thanks for being here, I hope you’re having a great summer thus far and I’ll see you next week!
