Today I’m excited to share with you a brand new product available in the Piano Pantry shop!
It’s a sequenced set of custom links to use with the Note Rush app.
This product was a result of wanting to give all my students well-sequenced, note-naming assignments to do at home each week that focused on small groups of notes at a time with lots of repetitions.
Rather than creating these assignments manually for every student every week, I sat down and designed an entire well-sequenced set all at once.
Teachers will find it especially useful when using it in conjunction with any kind of online assignment tools such as email, Google Docs, or Tonara (a software program for giving student assignments online.)
In this post, I’ll give a quick primer on Note Rush then show you how this product can be incredibly useful for you as a teacher!
P.S. Be sure and get the 15% discount code at the end of the post in celebration of the launch of the product.
Please note this product is not produced by or in conjunction with either Note Rush or Tonara and is of my own accord.
Quick Primer on Note Rush
Note Rush is an app that listens to students playing individual notes on the piano and can tell if they are playing the correct key.
They have an excellent set of five predesigned levels that fit nicely with teaching note-naming using landmark notes.
In their level designer, you can create a custom set of notes and send a link directly to the student. As long as they have Note Rush installed on their device when they click that link, it will open up that exact set of notes assigned.
Here’s a quick 1:00 video showing you what that looks like.
Why Is This Product Needed?
When learning new notes, I have found students do better when practicing smaller groups of notes with lots of repetitions, working in a “micro-progressive” manner toward one of the five full sets.
While it’s not a big deal to use the level designer to do this in the lesson, I like to make it a regularly recurring assignment so they have one set every week to practice at home – building a habit.
Considering this is something I work all my students through until they’ve mastered all notes, it became unnecessarily repetitive for me to create these same sets over and over to send to students to practice at home each week.
Thus, was born this series!
Let’s Take a Look!
There are five levels included. These levels all correlate to what I currently use in my studio for our annual studio-wide One-Minute Club note-naming challenge.
Level 1 – 10 Notes (Bass F to Treble G)
Level 2- 16 Notes (Bass C to Treble C)
Level 3 – 24 Notes (All notes on Grand Staff)
Level 4- 16 Notes (Ledgers Lines)
Level 5 – 36 Notes (All notes from Low C to High C including ledgers)
Each level in this series has anywhere from 5-10 “micro-progressive” practice sets working the student UP TO the full level.
Let’s use Level 1 as an example.
The end goal is all the notes between Bass F and Treble G. The breakdown of the 5 practice sets are:
01.0 Landmarks Bass F + Middle C(x2) + Treble G
01.1 Middle AB(C)DE
01.2 Middle C to Treble G
01.3 Bass F to Middle C
01.4 Bass F to Treble G
As you can see, the last set in that level is the full set of notes.
Three Ways to Use This Resource
There are three ways you can use this resource with your students:
- In your lessons. Keep the PDF in an easy-to-access location, such as adding a link to your tablet’s home screen. Pull up the file, click on the link, and the group of notes will open up in Note Rush.
- Send links directly each week using your digital assignment tool of choice, such as email or Google Docs. Cut and paste the link from the PDF directly into their digital assignment sheet.
- Create a permanent repertoire assignment series in Tonara.
This latter one is how I best recommend utilizing this resource. Once you use this series to create a set of assignments in your personal Tonara “repertoire” database, sending practice assignments will be a breeze.
Watch this video for an in-depth preview of the series as well as how you can use it to easily create a permanent assignment series in Tonara.
The product preview is about 4:00 minutes. Starting at 4:20, I will show how you can integrate this with Tonara.
The details given in the next section are talked about in the video as well.
Details from the Video
Each sequenced assignment is labeled with:
- Assignment name
- Level #
- Names of notes being quizzed
- Number of notes being quizzed and repetitions
- Hyperlink
Here are some more screenshots and details:
1) Assignment name “Note Rush”
2) Level # (01-05)
The assignments are numbered in a way that makes it easy for the teacher to assign, and for both teacher and student to see and follow their progress.
The level numbers begin with a “0” because, in a program like Tonara, when going from single to double digits, it will order them like this:
1.
10.
9.
Besides ordering numerically, double numbers make them cleaner visually.
08
09
10…etc.
3) Names of the notes being quizzed
Every level begins with the landmark notes that are most applicable.
4) Number of notes being quizzed and repetitions
The general goal was 25-30. Anything shorter goes super fast and any longer can be taxing.
5) Hyperlink
How To Purchase
Add this product to your cart or view it in the Piano Pantry shop.
