How to get those poor confused beginners to learn the symbols for Up bow, Down Bow, Crotchet, Minim, Semibreve, Quaver and Treble Clef. I play this game sometime in the first few lessons with my beginners. It also gives them a chance to put their violin down and shake their tired arms out.
The idea is that you need two different colours of paper (I have orange and blue). For the Giant Floor Cards, you need one colour for the words, and a different colour for the music symbols. You need the opposite for your flash cards (ie I have orange for my giant floor symbols, and orange for my word flash cards, blue for my giant floor words and blue for my music symbol flash cards). Don’t forget to laminate your cards so they will last you a while. The Giant Floor Cards WILL be walked on.
How to play:-
- Lay all the Giant Floor Cards out as if playing a memory/concentration game (I like to alternate colours – orange, blue etc, but that’s just me).
- Shuffle the flashcards and show the top one to the student. If it is a word card, they have to stand on the symbol that is the same colour as the word card you are holding up. An orange flash card goes with an orange floor symbol card etc.
- Keep going through the flash cards in your hand until your student is confident with these symbols/words.
Print the following out in one colour:-
Giant Music Symbol floor cards
Print the following out in a different colour:-
Warning: These cards CAN be a little slippery depending on what shoes the student has on. For safety reasons, I only have one student play this at a time, and we go through slowly and get them to describe what they can see on the flash cards I’m holding up.
