Teens play complicated music. Complex key signatures and rhythms force teens and their teachers to dedicate almost every second of a piano lesson to mastering the mechanics of challenging tunes.
When playing intermediate piano pieces, hitting the correct key at the correct time and holding it for the correct amount of beats is infinitely more challenging than playing elementary level repertoire. For this reason, teens can spend weeks, or months, learning a single piece.
It’s no wonder teachers of teens just can’t find time for ear training; every second must be spent on the bench!
Unfortunately, as a result, many teens have untrained ears. And when a teen has untrained ears, this will be reflected in piano performances that lack the finer details that bring a piano piece to life.
We are, therefore, encouraging you to devote some time in every teen lesson to ear-training activities. To help you get started, today we’re sharing a printable ear training game.
Ear Training Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated
A polished piano performance results from attention to phrasing, articulation, and dynamics. But that doesn’t mean ear-training games need to focus only on these skills. The goal of ear-training games is to help students connect the music they see on a piece of paper to sounds they can create in their minds.
Teachers of teens should begin ear training by reinforcing basic intermediate listening skills. As students learn to hear less complex concepts, they’ll be developing a trained ear that will be ready to pay attention to all of the “finer details”.
In today’s teen ear-training game, students will be listening for a raised seventh as they attempt to distinguish between natural and harmonic skills.
While this game works well as a standalone activity, it works wonders when paired with our recently released book, WunderKeys Intermediate Pop Studies For Piano 2. This series is quickly becoming THE go-to resource for teaching teens. Each book in the series is like a “lesson in a box”, eliminating the hours and hours of planning that is typical for teachers of teens.
You can check out WunderKeys Intermediate Pop Studies For Piano 2 here.
Click here or on the image below to download today’s game.
Teri Wilson says
I can’t figure out how to play the Teen Ear Training game above! I see the student rolls a die, then colors a number of squares or circles that correspond to the value on the die. Since a die only has six numbers — how can you color squares or circles that are higher than 6?
Andrea says
The numbers in the shapes don’t have anything to do with the dice. Use the die roll to determine how many shapes to color (any ones). The numbers inside are simply potential “secret numbers” that you’ve chosen between 1 and 42. Your student gets 1 point for every one of these secret numbers that have been colored when the game is over. All the die roll is doing is telling your student how many shapes to color 🙂