A Year of MMG: Grand Staff Cards

As stated in my original biweekly plan, I use the Staff Slates and Grand Staff Cards together.  However, I use them at almost every single lesson in the beginning, so we make progress quickly.  After a month, even the youngest children can usually remember where the C's and clefs are located on the staff.

The next step is to connect the pretty, colored, movable magic notes with the more ordinary, black, static notes found on printed music.  To do this, I have the student play a quick game of Fine, and while the pieces are still in place, I take out the deck of Grand Staff Cards and place one next to the Staff Slate. 

"Anything look familiar on this card?"  The student is always eager to tell me all he knows about the staff: the clefs, the brace, the lines and spaces.  He can also usually point out the note, which is probably not one of the Five C's.

"Is this a C?" I ask.  There might be some hesitancy, so I encourage him to just try his best.  If he says yes, it's a C, I put it in a pile.  If he says no, it's not, I put it in another pile.  We go through the entire deck in this way.  I never tell him whether he's getting them right or wrong; he's never done this before, so it's a new experience anyway. 

When we finish, there's lots of "C's", but lots of non-C's too.  (Some students think anything with a ledger line is a C; some think everything on the bass staff is a C.  It varies greatly from person to person.)  I congratulate him on doing such good work.  "Let's go through this C pile again, and you explain to me why you picked each one."

(I don't mean to sound didactic here.  Word choice is SO important to a child, who feels vulnerable and fears failure no matter how well he may hide it.  It's so important that we help him to learn without making him feel foolish for simply not knowing something we happen to know already.)

The cool thing is that during this process, the student is able to see why all the other notes aren't C's.  I ask questions, like "Which C is this?" and "How many ledger lines does that C have?" and "What part of the bass clef is next to that C?"  As they look for the answers, they discover on their own that many of the "C's" are actually not C's, and they feel proud of themselves for having eliminated another choice on their own.

Once we have the six C cards separated, we play Fine, putting them in order (as on a keyboard, left being the lowest) and transferring them to the piano (they stand up perfectly just behind the keys!)  Once they are familiar with the C cards, we play Slap the C's, a wonderful game invented by some students in Amy Fowers' studio in Salt Lake City.  Basically, the teacher (or parent or other student) lays down the cards one at a time, forming a pile.  When a student sees a C, she slaps the floor ("Not the cards, please," I say; "They're not invincible!") and takes the C.  It's fast-paced and teaches instant recognition, which is invaluable later and much better than trying to remember a jingle or acrostic.  A fun variation for more advanced students is to penalize them if they slap on a card that's not a C; I take one of their C's and put it back in the pile.  Then they have to watch even more closely to get it back.

The C's are the foundation for everything else we'll do, so I spend a lot of time ensuring the students know them backwards and forwards.  Once they're very comfortable with them, I'll move on to D's, laying out the six C's and going through the deck to find notes that are one step above C.  We play Slap the D's to learn them well and then move on to Suspense and Five Hiding, where I make D's more valuable than C's.

Next we learn B's in the same way.  And after that . . . well, you might not believe me, but after that, they basically know the notes.  All of them.  It's really that easy when they're having fun, getting constant reinforcement and learning instant visual recognition.  Yesterday I told one of my students, "You're a much better reader than I was at your age."  It was the understatement of the year: at his age, I was hiding my books and wailing about how much I hated reading music.  He'd just played a round of Slap the C's, D's and B's (yes, simultaneously!) and gotten 17 out of 18 right, all the while cracking jokes and carrying on a conversation with his father.

Every teacher should have the gift of a student who reaches higher than she ever could.  It gives you the feeling that somehow, the world really is getting to be a better place.