A Year of MMG: Alphabet Cards

As much as I appreciate the careful and beautiful design of the more complex Music Mind Games materials, the simplest ones may just be my favorite.  That would be the Alphabet Cards.

Well, to be honest, I don't have a favorite; I love all the materials for different reasons.  But these cards are my favorite place to start for any student.  They're so wonderfully simple!  All you need to know are the first seven letters of the alphabet.

I use most of the games from Music Mind Games to begin, especially for my youngest students (2-4.)  Chapter 1 has a wonderful progression that takes the child from identification ("What Letter is This?" and "Learning Letters") to ordering and categorization ("FAT SNAKE," "Fix the Order".)  All of the games are designed to teach and test simultaneously, enabling the teacher to assess progress instantly.  They're also very simple and intuitive; if someone tossed you a set of Alphabet Cards and said, "here, teach the class these," you'd probably start out with something very similar.

Chapter 2 reinforces the concept of the "circular" keyboard, which can be tricky for young minds.  It starts with SNAKE, a simple chain of letters that repeats over and over.  Students love to make snakes in all forms; it's one of the Classic Games, a concept that's applicable to many MMG materials.  FINE, another Classic Game, is also a great choice if time is limited; the object is simply to put your cards in order and call "Fine!" when finished.  You can build backwards or forwards, vertically or horizontally, and starting with any of the letters, for an almost limitless number of variations.  The chapter concludes with Alphabet Scrabble, which is always fun to teach (silently, of course, as in this video.)

After that (or right away, if the student is more advanced) we move to Chapter 8.  We repeat all of these games with thirds instead of seconds, and games like Solitaire and Speed, which are not too challenging with seconds, become a lot trickier and more fun.  Even games like Before and After give students pause when they're learning thirds.  You can really sense the effects of all the repetition sinking in here, and they're thrilled when they finally make a breakthrough and begin to think of the musical alphabet as a fluid progression.

Those should be enough for at least a month's worth of games, but I'll check back in next week with some ideas for the Blue Jello Cards!