folk dancing Archives - Music by Andrea

Students experience the joy of music through folk dancing.

Group piano class is one of my favorite events of the year. About six of my students are able to make it, and we gather in my basement studio. During this hour, we enjoy each other’s company, listen to each other’s pieces, play a couple group music games, and folk dance.

The students usually bound out of the house with big grins on their faces, and anxiously await the next group piano class. I think it’s because I usually pick a rather lively folk dance, but maybe that’s my bias talking. I used to teach in a general music classroom and would jump in and do the folk dance if someone needed a partner. It has always been a favorite of mine. Continue reading “Group Piano Class – Ideas from Spring 2019”

These are bean bags I made for steady beat games.

Steady beat used to be a concept that I used to assume all students just kind of knew. I didn’t understand the deep necessity for students experiencing it, and how a strong sense of the steady beat would improve other areas of a student’s performance in piano.

I talked more about this in the importance of establishing a steady beat with piano students in the first post of this series. You can read it here: Steady Beat Part 1: The Importance of Establishing Steady Beat in Piano Students.

Today’s post will detail the different steady beat activities that I use frequently in my studio. I am a firm believer that when teaching music to young children, we must first allow them to experience a new concept before asking them to intellectualize it (Choksy, The Kodaly Method I: Comprehensive Music Education. 3rd Edition. p10). Because of this there is always a couple steady beat activities in every lesson for the first few years they take lessons. Continue reading “Steady Beat Part 2: Beyond the Metronome – Movement Activities to Establish Steady Beat with Piano Students”