When I had my frog chart up on my door, my younger students loved to just stand there and count the number of students I had whilst waiting for me to finish with the student before them.

Parents thought it was great too, and I thought it was good for some parents to see that I didn’t only teach their child!

Here’s another one with a Cat in the hat theme.  Each hat has a student’s name on it.  I have a few students!  If you have a giant noticeboard, you could have red paper as a background to make it look really effective.

If you’d like this for your studio, here’s a link: ‘Look how many’ poster

Here’s a preview of my Sneetches tally board:

I removed all the Harry Potter containers and jars from my piano, and I have a new canister there now.  It is labelled “You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes.  You can steer yourself any direction you ‘chews’ “.  I have filled it with Apple Chews, and students are drooling!

They need to get over 200 mins consistently or beat their practice score from last week in order to earn a ‘chew’.  The great thing is that there are different varieties of ‘chews’, so you can add different things to the jar each week.

Here is the quote I used on my jar.  Jar quotes It seems such a waste of paper for one quote, so I will rack my brains to try and come up with some more.  I have some flash cards in mind, and may need a quote or two to put on those.

My studio finished up with the Warthogs theme last term.  Most of my students got involved and absolutely loved it, but you may get some students who can’t do Harry Potter either because they’re too young or for religious reasons.

We had an awful lot of fun though.  Slytherdor won.  We worked out they ended up with almost double the points of what the poor Ravenpuffs were able to achieve.

Here are the few final details you probably wanted to see.

Golden Snitches:

These were gold foil covered chocolate balls.  They were a big hit, because no-one had seen them before.  The secret is that they’re Christmas chocolates from Darrell Lea.  They also come covered in red and green foil, but I ate those ones ;D

…and the Tally Board for the second last week of Term:

Poor Ravenpuffs definitely got slaughtered in this challenge.  I would write up the total tally of the week in red on the top half of the board, and keep doing the weekly individual practice numbers on the bottom half of the board.  So our Harry Potter challenge lasted for 7 weeks, with another week introduction (or a practice run), and one week to close so students could see who won, and the final prize be awarded (a new shoulder rest), and one week right at the beginning to wait for all the students to come back to lessons.  Ten weeks altogether.  Hopefully that makes sense ;D

I have a new theme for the next two terms. One that  will involve the younger students too.  I think it will be as much fun and be inspirational as well.

Happy music making!