The Piano Pantry Podcast is available on these podcast streaming networks: 104
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, iHeart Radio, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Radio Public
Episode Summary
Would you like to have a more streamlined approach to your group classes or have a few more tried and true activities in your back pocket? Listen in as Amy shares some of her favorite go-to activities to conduct during group class weeks.
Items Mentioned
A Visual Listening Guide for Group Class Performances (Free Download)
Promote Active Listening With These Visual Listening Cards
Group Lesson Planning Made Easy
Happy Birthday By Ear: The Ultimate Teaching Resource
Expressive Movement Videos for Preschool Lessons and Group Classes
CSV File for Expressive Movement Videos
Related Posts
A Great Game for Reviewing Major Chords and 5-Finger Patterns
December Fun: Christmas Games and Activities for Your Studio
Group Class Scheduling Experiences and Ideas
Holiday Activities for Your December Group Classes
Manipulatives and Piano Games for Private and Group Lessons
Transcript
I’m Amy Chaplin, and you’re listening to episode 104 of The Piano Pantry Podcast.
In today’s episode, I’m going to share some of my favorite go-to activities for group classes. I was doing the calculations, and considering that for the past 13 years, I’ve conducted group classes 6-8 weeks out of the year in lieu of the private lesson with anywhere from 3-6 groups per week, I figure I’ve done at least 300-400 classes. That’s kind of a fun number to think about.
One thing I’ve come to discover is that there are a few tried and true categories of activities I tend to navigate toward. We may not do every single one every time we have a class, but keeping those broad categories in the back of my mind has been really helpful in streamlining lesson planning for these classes – sometimes to the point that I barely even have to plan.
If you would like to have a more streamlined approach to your group classes or would like to have a few more tried and true activities in your back pocket – stick around for the next 10 minutes or so. I’ve got your back.
One thing I learned pretty quickly when conducting group classes is that it’s nice to have some kind of activity for students to work on when they first enter. Arrival times can vary as students trickle in, and it is nice to have something they can sit down to right away to keep them occupied while we wait on others to arrive.
Most of the time, I just do a simple worksheet, whether it’s a crossword puzzle of music terms, a coloring sheet for note names, or a fill-in-the-blank for the parts of the piano; you get the idea.
Once all students have arrived, we do performances right away. A lot of these things, of course, depend on the level of students you are working with, but at a minimum, I always ask them to actively listen and determine if the piece is in duple or triple and major or minor.
For my beginner students, I like having a physical, tactile way to direct their attention, so I often use a visual listening guide page or listening cards.
The visual listening guide is available on the Piano Pantry website and includes images that help students determine meter, tonality, dynamics, articulations, tempo, and mood. You can laminate these with thick laminating sheets and have the students use dry erasers to fill them out for each performance.
The listening cards are something I first found on Jennifer Fink’s old Pianimation site, which is no longer available, unfortunately. She had students do them in a race format where students race to flip over the elements they hear. They are around the size of a recipe card with each card having one musical element on it. Since you can no longer find those cards online and since they’ve been such a great tool in my own studio, I decided to create my own version, which I just posted on the blog.
I included quite a few more than her original set as I wanted to include things like duple vs triple, high, middle, and low sounds – for very beginners – and more. What I normally do is assign students different categories to listen for so one student might be listening for articulation and dynamics, another student for meter and tonality, and another for mood and tempo. They flip the cards face down that they don’t hear and leave face up the musical elements they do hear. Then, with each student, we rotate which elements they’re listening for.
There are a few other great listening guides out there, which I have listed in the blog post called Group Lesson Planning Made Easy. Everything I mention today by the way will of course be available and linked in the show notes.
After performances, I try to do some kind of audiation-based activity. It might be having rhythm conversations where we stand in a circle and do something like this:
[Verbalize examples]
We might do a tonal exercise like this:
[Verbalize example]
By the way if you would like to have more guidance on teaching students to play Happy Birthday by ear, check out my ultimate teaching resource where you get a step-by-step guide for walking students through the process of learning the tune by ear and then creating their own variations and arrangements.
If I have a group of really young students, sometimes I like to do expressive movement videos, which I first learned about when exploring John Feierabends First Steps in Music classes. He has some DVD’s where classical music is set to expressive movement in a Dalcroze-esque way. When Covid times hit, I wanted a way to have some of my littles do these at home, so I went on the search and actually came across a whole slew of them on YouTube. I compiled a big list of these videos in a blog post on the Piano Pantry website.
I also recently just made available a CSV file that you can use to upload your own assignment series for these 15 videos into your online practice app. I use the Vivid practice app, and it allows me to bulk load up assignments using a CSV spreadsheet file. For a shorter term, my assignments folder in Vivid is named “Dance Videos,” but you could also rename it to “Expressive Movement” if you like. I just like action term “dance.”
The third thing I like to do is some kind of ensemble work. You could either use notated ensemble music from Alfred or Hal Leonard, self-published materials from someone like Piano with Lauren or Miss Dorla’s Piano Pyramids. You could even do something simple like a lead sheet where one student plays the root of the chord only in octaves, another student plays blocked chords, and another the melody.
Sometimes, rather than piano ensembles, we do rhythm ensemble work using either the Rockin’ Rhythm Ensembles resource from Three Cranky Women published by Kjos or Wendy Steven’s Rhythm Cups.
After some of these foundational activities, I move into general piano games with whatever time we have. Over the years, I have found 75 minutes to be a nice amount of time for group classes. Unless your main goal is just a performance class, 60 minutes always felt cut short, and while I could probably easily go 90 minutes with most groups, it always felt a little too long for my younger beginners. 75 minutes was a good compromise for everyone all around.
To recap, activities you can consider include an entrance activity, directed active listening during performances, an audiation-based activity, ensemble work, and lastly, piano games.
If you’d like to follow up with anything I’ve mentioned on today’s show, including links and a full transcript, head to pianopantry.com/podcast/episode104.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please consider taking a minute to rate and review the podcast so the technology world notices that it’s loved and will magically share it with others who might benefit from and enjoy it just as much as you.
Stay tuned for next week, where I’ll discuss the difference between two of my favorite organizational life management apps – Evernote and Notion. You’ll hear how Notion has overtaken Evernote as my main organization app but how Evernote still holds one particularly superior element that has allowed me to utilize it in an even more focused way than ever before.
If you’ve struggled to find a task management app that works for you, mark your calendar for March 8 and 9, as you’re going to want to attend a big event my friend Joy Morin and I are putting on called Organize Your Life Using Notion. It will be an amazing two-day event where we help you systematically build your own workspace using this incredible app. A bonus follow-up date for those who want to take it further will also be available on March 22. Registration will open in early February, so stay tuned for more details!
Thanks for being here, everyone – I can’t wait to chat with you next week!
