St. Patrick's Day Group Piano Lesson

Here's a picture of some St. Patrick's Day pencils that I handed out to each student. I thought it would be fun to teach leading the music and have these as their batons. We lead the music to 'Irish Washerwoman' and everyone caught on quickly!

The first game we played was a rhythm game that I downloaded from www.susanparadis.com. I thought it would be fun to do it with magnets (who doesn't like magnets, right?) and then the students all took turns figuring out the rhythm patterns. I then had them take a cazoo and sound out the rhythm puzzle that they had solved.

Here's the next game we played. I actually made two of these magnetic staves, and then I had the students do a relay on building chords with 3 magnets each. I had them pick a chord out of a bag and they raced to see who could finish it first.

Another worksheet that I had the students fill out was this one, Shamrock Notes, from www.susanparadis.com. She has some great ideas that are already put together so it saves prep time! The students had to fill out all of the notes on the Grand Staff.

Here's a little game that I made up. I wanted it to go along with the theme (St. Patrick's Day) so I made it green of course! I even used little coins as part of the game. Here's how it goes: You take a dice and roll a color. Which ever color you land on, you draw a card for that particular color (in this case, there is yellow, pink, and blue) and put a marker on it--I used a diamond for fun! Then you have to answer the question on the card. If you get it right, you get a coin! The object of the game is to get the diamond to the pot of gold at the end. Each student took at least one turn in this game. You might want to add spaces to make it longer! If the student answered the question right, they also got to pick a coin.

This is an example of the cards that were used in the game. You can use whatever you want. For example, we studied Mozart at the group lesson, and so I included questions about what we had studied about that composer.

Ok, we're now learning about Mozart! This semester we are studying this composer as well as learning a piece by him. Each student is participating in this, and will be performing a piece by Mozart in the Spring recital in May! I made up a little fill-in-the-blank worksheet to help the students learn specific facts about Mozart.