By now you've read the History and invention of solfege as a language of music. And you've discovered our top seven reasons Solfege works for teaching. In this Part 3 of our Solfege series, we give you a few tips for learning these hand signs and finding meaning in them!
Help Your Child Learn Solfege At first encounter, these 7 syllables are nothing more than abstract sounds and hand shapes to be memorized. Let's Play Music teachers have come up with some handy mnemonics to help your child remember it all, but the good news is that as your child uses this language and internalizes the function, the syllables and handshapes will become meaningful on their own!
Be sure to always use the hand shape with the syllable and the pitch, and with a bit of regular use these will all get neurally linked together and become a fantastic musical tool in your child's toolkit. Help Me Remember Below are playful talking points you can use with your child to give the hand shapes additional meaning at first introduction, by relating them to concrete (and silly) ideas kids can make sense of. After only a few weeks or months, your child will begin to conceptualize each syllable as it's own, real concept, and have no trouble remembering the hand shape. Each hand shape also has a playful high-five you can give to your child in solfege-style; this gives you yet another great way to say "well done!", practice usage, and keep the mood playful.
DO (the STRONG or FIRM tone, "HOME"): "It looks like your hands are holding onto a rolling pin! Are you rolling out some DOugh? Is it pizza dough or maybe cookie dough? Let's pretend to take a bite and taste it! Yum!" DO five: "Gimme a DO-bump! (or DO-bomb)" Tap knuckles with your child, then open up your hands like they exploded. Make explosion sounds and facial expressions for effect.
RE (the ROUSING or HOPEFUL tone, it easily slides down into DO): "This pointy RE is the tip of my ray-gun! Watch out or it will zap you." Use your RE hands to vibrate and zap your child right in the armpit while making a bzzzzt! ray-gun sound. Or "It's REining on your head!"Make
a RE handshape and set it on your child's head, then slide your hands
down her shoulders and wiggle your fingers for a rainy effect. RE five: "Let's make an X-ray!" Tip your RE hands forward to touch her RE hands, so it looks like an X and say "X", then tip them upright and say "RE!"
MI(the STEADY or CALM tone) : "Who puts their arms flat on the table like this? ME, of course!" MI five: Sing on mi pitch as you sing "Give ME a hug!" Hold your hands in MI position, then pull the fingertips apart so you can reach around the child for a hug.
FA(the DESOLATE tone): Draw a smiley face on your thumbprints and hold them up. Pretend they are walking toward each other. "Mr. Thumb and his brother went walking along and I told them, 'Be careful or you'll FAAAAAAll down and land on your heads." Have Mr. Thumbs turn upside down to become FA. This helps students remember to point thumbs down. FA five: "I have a FA-lower for you!" Either you or your child should make a flower pot by holding a hand in O-shape. Then insert your FA thumb down into the flowerpot, then open the rest of your fingers to make the FA-lower bloom.
SOL (the GRAND or BRIGHT tone): "I ate SOL much DO that now I am SOL full!" Place your SOL hands on your belly to show you're full, or stretch them out with the sol handshape to show how now your belly is"SOL big!". SOL five: Most students are already familiar with high fives and low fives, so practice those first. "Gimme a high-five and a SOL- five, because we don't need a low-five!" Tap the back of your SOL to your child's and vocalize a smacking sound for effect.
LA(the SAD or WEEPING tone): "Now my hands feel so bLAh! My fingers are too bLAh to do anything more than LA." Emphasize how relaxed and droopy the fingers are as they just hang there. Make a blah face for dramatic effect. LA five: "Show me your cLAw!" Reach your right LA hand to your child's right LA hand while saying "rowr!" or "meaow!" like a cat or monster with claws, then repeat with the left. Your child will also laugh if you say "Gimme a LA shake!" and when they hold out their LA hand, you shake it (much like a dead-fish handshake) with a feigned look of repulsion on your face.
TI (the PIERCING or SENSITIVE tone, easily pulls up into DO): "This handsign almost looks like a letter of the alphabet..." Tip your TI fingers to make a letter T and look surprised. Let your child discover that it looks like 'T'. TI five:"Make a TI-riangle and I'll give you a tap!" Pretend the child's TI hand shape is a triangle (musical instrument). Use the triangle mallet or your finger to tap it and vocalize a chiming noise as if you have hit a triangle. Show the children a triangle to be sure they know what one is! I hope you have fun playfully helping your child learn these hand shapes. Just as neurons for the sound, the hand shape, and the syllable are strengthened together during learning, it will make a big difference if the neurons for happy feelings and having fun are active during your child's learning! Don't miss the other posts in the series: SOLFEGE: Part 2: 7 Reasons We Love Solfeg for Teaching Music
My barely 5-yo daughter is thrilled to be a Green Turtle student and play songs on the piano like her older siblings. Unlike her brothers who took Let's Play Music years ago, she has tiny, weak (darling!) little fingers. Today I share some ideas for strengthening little fingers with ideas you can do both with and without the keyboard.
The Wisdom of Let's Play Music I am relieved that my daughter has had a year of ear-training, note-reading, vocal-training and harp-playing before being required to demonstrate dexterity and finger strength. Her mind and ear were ready for Red and Blue level theory and exercises, and she soaked them up. It would have been a frustrating waste of time, effort and motivation if she'd been sitting at a piano all year, wishing her fingers could keep up with the amazing pace of her mind! Fingers develop at a slow pace, even for kids with sharp minds, and Let's Play Music planned for it. Strengthening At the Piano I can't say enough good things about the drills assigned by LPM teachers. If your kiddo has weak fingers, never skimp on bubble holding and tapping, individual finger-playing, and kit-kat key pressing! This video shows exactly what bubble-hands could look like: I also have my daughter play the kit-kat song with 2 fingers for the group of 2 (pressing them 4 times before moving on) and 3 fingers on the group of 3. Our goal is to do it with those nice rounded fingers. Strengthening Without A Piano I can't keep her at the piano all day, but luckily there are scores of playful ways to strengthen fingers when we're on-the-go. The dollar store likely has everything you need for games that will strengthen overall grip/flexion, improve individual finger strength, and improve individual finger control and independent movement.
Sponges: Make a game of filling containers (perhaps during bath time) with water by squeezing a soggy sponge into the container. Squeezing strengthens wrist muscles and finger flexors. Bulb Syringe: Maybe you have one of these bulbs left over from when your student was a newborn!? Let her enjoy filling and squeezing the bulb with water at bath time. Ask her to try squeezing with different fingers (only thumb and finger 2? only thumb and finger 3?) Of course every activity is more fun if you fill the bulbs with paint and make it a craft. Spray bottles: Make cool designs on the sidewalk by squirting water on the cement. If squeezing seems easy, try using fewer fingers on the trigger! If you've got good weather, fill spray bottles and squeeze bottles with home-made sidewalk spray paint.
Play-doh: We play "mushy pushy." My daughter holds a ball of dough in her hand and when I say a finger number (or roll a die), she squishes only that finger deep into the dough. There are plenty of play-doh games online to keep your kiddo entertained and squeezing for hours. Stress-balls: We made our own stress ball by putting flour in a balloon. Just to be silly, we sing the "flat little red balloon" song instead of "great big red balloon" while squishing it and strengthening fingers. Finger Exerciser: $6 is a pretty cheap price to pay for a GYM MEMBERSHIP for your fingers. That's what you get when you buy a finger exerciser (available on Amazon.) You can work the whole grip, or each finger individually. Clothespins: Pick up small items using a clothespin as tongs, or clip clothespins around the edge of your Green Turtles songbook. Look online for dozens of clothespin educational games or super-cute animal crafts with opening mouths made from clothespins. Try opening with different combinations of fingers!
Tennis Ball Puppet: Make a puppet by cutting a mouth slit in a tennis ball. It takes a strong grip to squeeze his mouth open (and you can hide small objects in there!) Draw eyes with marker or glue on some googley eyes. I Love You: Teach your child the classic handsign for "I Love You" and flash it to each other every day! The ASL (American Sign Language) alphabet and counting numbers also require finger strength and control to shape little hands. Ask math questions and make a game of only answering with fingers. I hope these ideas help you and your little one strengthen fingers without getting too frustrated in these early weeks at the piano. In no time at all her hands will be stronger and she'll be playing chords and intervals with confidence AND be able to remember those hand positions for life. -Gina Weibel, M.S. Let's Play Music Teacher
I was recently on a 5-hour flight with my four-year-old, and we stayed busy the entire time. I had packed her Memory game and her Let's Play Music tone bells amid other toys and books. Together we invented "Memory Sounds," a way to play the Memory game using tone bells to strengthen both ear-training and memory. If you have a new set of tone bells and are looking for another fun way to put them to use, read on!
Sound Memory What you will need: A Memory game (check your local thrift shop- I got mine for $2), a set of Let's Play Music tone bells, and a curtain or binder or wall to hide the bells from the players/ listeners. Set Up You won't need all of the matching pairs from your Memory game. At most you will need 8 pairs. Set up a divider so your child can't see the bells. Lay your bells from left to right, high to low: this seems backwards to YOU, but your child facing you will hear low sounds on HER LEFT and high sounds on HER RIGHT. Next to each bell, choose two different pictures to represent that sound. Finally, put the matches from all of those pictures into a "draw box".
The first time we played this game, we were in tight quarters on a plane (photos below). I used a blanket draped between our seats as a barrier, and had the bells on my tray. Since it was our first time and I wanted her to get confident with the game, I only used three pairs. If your child struggles with hearing and matching sounds, just use a few pairs, and use tones that are NOT adjacent (not an interval of a second). I used Do, Mi and Sol.
One-Player Game The listener chooses two cards and holds them up so the musician can see them. The musician states the picture and then plays the corresponding bell. "Train...ding! Banana...ding!" If the two sounds match, the player makes a pair. If they don't match, she tries a different combination of pictures. Even when she hasn't made a match, she's practiced identifying if the sounds match! A valuable skill! This game is fun and challenging for ANY family member, even recent Let's Play Music graduates. I was impressed how quickly my 8-year-old LPM-grad made matches. (In the video below, we hadn't yet realized it's best to have the bells laid out high-left to low-right for the musician.)
Multi-Player Game Each player takes a turn picking two pictures and listening to the sounds, hoping for a match. Just like in regular Memory, players can gain advantage by paying attention to the combinations chosen by others. Major Scale Strategy It didn't take my kids long to come up with a helpful strategy! Each time you guess two cards and hear the tones, set the cards on the floor in a line, placing the cards approximately as far apart as the tones sounded, with the higher sound to the right. You'll visually be lining up the tones and helping them find mates. At the end of the game, all of your pairs will be arranged in a Major Scale! Remove the screen/ divider, and you'll be able to check that all of the matches were correct AND they are all in the correct order to make a major scale. I hope you'll have some family fun game time playing this game as the musician or the listener. Just for the record, the white noise on the airplane was so loud that the tinkle of our tone bells could hardly travel more than a few feet: no patrons were harassed in the making of this blog post. -Gina Weibel, M.S. Let's Play Music Parent
SOL (the GRAND or BRIGHT tone): "I ate SOL much DO that now I am SOL full!" Place your SOL hands on your belly to show you're full, or stretch them out with the sol handshape to show how now your belly is "SOL big!".
LA (the SAD or WEEPING tone): "Now my hands feel so bLAh! My fingers are too bLAh to do anything more than LA." Emphasize how relaxed and droopy the fingers are as they just hang there. Make a blah face for dramatic effect.
TI (the PIERCING or SENSITIVE tone, easily pulls up into DO): "This handsign almost looks like a letter of the alphabet..." Tip your TI fingers to make a letter T and look surprised. Let your child discover that it looks like 'T'.
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