Do your piano students struggle with articulation marks? Do your students even see articulation marks?… Or do they plough through piano pieces like a tween racing for Bieber tickets? If you count your students among the “bull in a china shop” variety, we can help!
Today’s Piano Teaching Game… Articulation Domination
Learning Objective
Today’s piano teaching game is designed to help piano students learn and recognize articulation markings.
Game Materials
– 1 set of flashcards with a variety of music notes on the staff
– 1 set of flashcards with a variety of articulation marks
– 2 hats (or containers)
– a stopwatch
Playing Articulation Domination
1. Separate the flashcards into one pile of notes and one pile of articulation marks.
2. Place the notes into one hat and the articulation marks into the other hat.
3. Instruct your student to pull one note and one articulation mark out of each hat.
4. Instruct your student to play the note in the style of the articulation mark shown.
5. Once they’ve got the hang of it, bring out the stopwatch. How many pairings can they correctly play in one minute? 30 seconds? Watch your students’ note reading speed and attention to articulation markings improve!
But wait… there’s more
If you are new to TeachPianoToday.com you might want to check out a couple of past piano games we have presented to teach bass clef notes and piano scales.
Miss Leslie says
What a great idea! There are so many things to look at on a piece of music and some of them look so similar, for example ties and slurs, dotted notes and staccatos. I think kids get kind of overloaded. I’ll definitely look at some of your other game suggestions.
Wishing you a song in your heart,
Miss Leslie @ Music with Miss Leslie
Andrea says
Hi Leslie – Hope your students enjoy the game…we’ll keep them coming! Happy teaching 🙂