Up the Sleeve - Tricks of my Trade

Practicing - especially the chunked way - can be a real drag for students still getting used to the routine; seeing the benefits can take awhile, and even then it can feel like trudging through mud.

While it's true that making music isn't all fun and games, there's no reason for it to stay that way! Here is one of my favorite ways to liven up chunk-practicing - with a card game.

 Remember all those awesomely decorated Valentines that flood the stores in January? Now I have a reason to stock pile them when they hit the clearance shelves.

Voila! With a dash of my conductors baton, these nifty pre-cut cards are now practice cards.

I teach musical form right from the start, and use form to chunk practice sections - so your first step in this musical card game is to label the form of the piece with A's and B's and C's (micro-form and phrasal forms in larger works). 'Lightly Row' is in a simple (phrasal) ternary form, so the phrases are labeled as A1, A2, B, and A2. At this level, I have found it helpful to differentiate between A sections when cadences are different.

Your music is marked and your students have listened and discussed why the phrases have names... now for the cards.

The cards now get a makeover: using a sharpie, each phrase gets a card named after itself.

The simple version of this card game is to shuffle and have the student pick a card... any card. Ok, now we chunk practice the section named on the card 5 times using....

The Myelinator:

Kinda like an abacus, but for counting practice repetitions. Fancy, I know...

The process is repeated through the rest of the cards.

Now you can put the cards in order and play the whole thing!

Having the parts of the music mixed up aids learning by removing context cues - students must know the section as a section and not merely as the middle of the song. This is great for memorizing - the cards can be used like flashcards, but for phrases. When it comes time for performances, freezing on a given phrase is no longer the end of the show - the student can simply choose a phrase and keep going. Because the phrases were practiced out of context, their performance doesn't depend on the previous phrase going well. 

Practice brain wise! And with a fun twist :)

I imagine 'Go Fish' could be incorporated somewhere in all of this...