In my previous post, In A Flash!, I explained how we use flash cards to help teach students to read notes on the staff. Students can look at the staff and quickly say the letter name of the note represented.
3 Step Reading
Of
course the letter name is not the full meaning of the note on the
staff. Letters are an abstraction that help us talk about keys and teach
music theory. We absolutely can't get through class without having letter-names for notes, but the piano key is the real meaning behind the note on the page.
Reading the note and playing it on the keyboard (Say it-Play it) is
the really practical skill, the end result of several steps, we are driving at.
STEP 1: A new student reads the note and identifies it "This is F!" (in my class, I have them sing the pitch as part of our game). Our purple flashcards help them learn this skill.
STEP 2: The student holds a mental visualization of what "F" looks like. Our alphabet pieces games from Yellow semester help them learn this skill.
STEP 3: The student seeks and finds the matching note, in the correct octave, and plays it. Again, I have them sing the pitch "This is F!" for ear correction. What do we have to help learn this skill? Teeny tiny flashcards.
Teeny Tiny Flashcards
I was looking for a way to really practice STEP 3 in the decoding process, and was delighted find these teeny tiny note flashcards that are exactly the size of a piano key (you can print them for $2) or you can get a similar, free version here.
I printed a set and mounted them on a foam sheet, and cut them up. I introduced them to my daughter in groups just as she was learning the groups in 3rd year.
Games
I keep my tiny flashcards a little treasure chest on the piano and play games with my daughter to reinforce step 3 of the reading process. Just do one game for a few minutes each day instead of or in addition to your purple cards.
Say It- Play It- Lay It: Your LPM teacher likes to play "Say It- Play It". We just add one more step. Draw the card, say the letter, play it on the keyboard, and lay the card on the key to show you're done. Each time you play this game, decide how many cards you will do. As you get faster, increase the number of cards you do at each practice. Attempting the whole box at your first sitting can be daunting, so pick a number that will just take 3 minutes, and congratulate your student on getting faster each time. Alternatively, decide you will work for 3 minutes and see how many you can get done.
Bananagram: Each person gets 5 cards randomly. Ready, set, go! Put them on the correct keys as quickly as you can. When one person is done, they say "take two!" and everyone must take 2 more (whether you were done or not!). Continue in this manner until the box is empty...then give everyone enough time to finish placing the pieces in their hand.
Fix-it, Felix! This game works well if you have a toddler who is longing to help. Let your youngster arrange the cards on keys in the octaves you are working on (they will be laughably wrong.) Then, your student chooses one card, picks it up and moves it to the correct key, bumping off whatever card had been there. She then takes that card to its correct home, bumping off whatever card had been there, etc. If you get a point when a card goes into an empty slot, do a quick check to see if you have won (everything correct) or not (when you find a mistake, pick it up and start working again.) It's exciting if you can win in one run without hitting any restarts! Your toddler will love to clean up for you, too, if you cut a slot in an oatmeal can for her to mail the pieces into.
Crazy Composer Choose 5-6 notes randomly from the box and put them on the correct keys. Play the 5 notes. Then, play them in any order to create your crazy composition. You are allowed to duplicate notes and make up any rhythm, but you can only use those notes!
Sol-Mi Soundboard: Draw a card, play the note, and place it on the key. Sing that note as "sol" and follow with a minor-3rd step down to "mi". Yes, they key in which you sing will change but you should be able to sing a sol-mi anywhere, any time, any key (LPM Teachers practice this, too)! That's the joy of being able to hear and sing intervals. (play 'sol' then play 3 keys lower to hear 'mi'. The color of key doesn't matter...just count down 3). Repeat with other cards. No matter where you start, you can sing this interval, I know it.
Go Fish: Play this game once you have all of the treble and bass clef lines and spaces in your box. Each player starts with 4 cards. Ask another player, "Do you have any treble-clef-spaces?" If so, they have to give them over! If not, you "go fish" for a card. Once you have all of the notes needed to sing one verse of our treble, bass, line, space song, place them on they keys where they belong, then continue the game.
Where are We Going?
Wow, the 3-steps for reading notes seems to take a long time: too long to be useful if we play every note in a song like that. As I mentioned in our post on learning to read, we read most of the song by looking at intervals and chunks of patterned notes. We only need to spell-check a small percentage of notes in a song, so it's okay if those take a little more time.
With practice, you'll also get incredibly faster at finding individual notes. When I read new music, I don't take mental time to think of the letter name. Because I have been conditioned, I have dropped that middle step and the process is faster.
It's like when we first learned to read words: we always noticed the individual letters (C-A-T) and thought about what sound each letter represented. As we improved, we stopped thinking of the abstract names of the letters, and just focused on the sounds they represented, and eventually moved on to noticing the whole word as a chunk. Learning to read music has a similar progression. For now, work on getting fast at matching staff notes to keyboard keys!
Want to be a Sight-reader?
Some musicians have a great ear, some are excellent at reading, and at Let's Play Music we set our students up to do both!
Sight-reading is the ability to look at music and play it correctly without having practiced it. How can you become better at sight-reading? A recent study surveyed MTNA-certified piano teachers and found that while 86% thought sight-reading was important, only 7% said they addressed it systematically with their students.
So it seems the answer may still be elusive, or may be the same for learning to read written words: read, read, read! This means you'll need a stockpile of easy-to-play tunes or a website that generates them for you. Songs you can sight-read correctly are MUCH simpler than songs you can play, but need a bit of practice on. So, you'll need a stockpile of easy stuff to start with. You might spend a few minutes at each practice sight-reading a few pieces!
Franz Liszt, known as the best sight-reader of all time, has a few tips for you as you begin your sight-reading journey:
1. Focus on Rhythm: The audience can forgive a mistake in pitch, but not rhythm. If you miss a beat, the whole song will be off (especially if you're playing with an ensemble!). Keep the rhythm perfectly and do your best with notes.
2. Don't Stop: Remember rule 1? The audience and judges will forgive a wrong note or two, but if you stop and go back to correct it, it draws attention to the mistake and disrupts the flow of the piece (and your ensemble will leave you behind!) So RESIST the urge to stop and correct. For sight-reading, you must keep going. (If you are learning a new song and not trying to sight-read, learn it measure by measure for goodness sakes.)
3. Let the most difficult passage set the tempo: Your goal is to play the whole piece correctly. You've heard this music before, and you know there's a tricky bit in the middle, so start off playing slowly enough that you'll be successful on the tricky bits, too.
4.Learn to look ahead: When you drive a car, you don't only look at the pavement directly under your car, or just in front of the hood! To be safe, you look a few blocks ahead so you know what is coming in the next 4-8 beats. In music, push yourself to be looking at the measure beyond what you are actually playing, so you can process and prepare for it.
Only play any piece of music TWICE for sight-reading. After that, I'm guessing you'll start to memorize it. If you had a lot of errors BOTH TIMES you played it, choose something easier for your sight-reading efforts.
Good luck with your reading skills: Read, read, read, and over time the difficulty level of your sight-reading material will advance. Maybe someday you'll be like Liszt: able to sit down and play challenging pieces you've never seen!
-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher
"The treble clef spaces are easy, you see, 'cuz space rhymes with face and spells F-A-C-E!" Are you humming along to this catchy tune? That means you and your 3rd year Let's Play Music student are on the way to note reading!
Why did we wait?
This is the final year of the program; are you surprised that we haven't drilled notes yet? In our post on learning to read music the LPM way, I explained that students thrive when they find meaning in the notes they read, understand how notes work intervallicaly, and are learning to audiate as they read before they knuckle down to the abstractness of notation. Not surprisingly, laying a solid foundation takes two years of ear training and pre-reading skills.
Where are we going?
The goal this year is for your child to read notes with fluency. He will look at the notes and instantly know them. This skill is note-spelling. "That's F. That's A." Any given individual note on paper can quickly be matched up to its given individual piano key.
The sad news is your child will shortly graduate from LPM. The glad news he'll begin learning lots more interesting and challenging pieces of music. Note-spelling is an important part of learning new music, and we want your child to master it. In the article on reading music, I explained that being a fast note-speller does not guarantee fast sight-reading of new music. Musicians use note-spelling to identify key notes in a chunk of music. Then they use patterns, intervals, and chord shapes to fill in the remaining information for the chunk. By now your student has had lots of practice with those skills, too.
This is the mix of spelling and intervallic skills I hear from my brain when reading music: "Let's see…the first note is a D and I jump down a 5th…and then I do a run of baby steps going up…and jump down a 5th again. Then I have to play.…treble E, and then down a 3rd and baby steps up." So, I don't actually spell out very many notes but they are critical to know.
If you suspect your child is trying to spell out every note of every new song, put a stop to it! Encourage identification of patterns, skips, steps, intervals, and chord shapes supplemented with a touch of note-spelling to hold it all together and keep it in place. Some kids are gifted note-spellers, but that skill cannot stand alone.
Do Flashcards Help Reading?
A parent once asked me, "Why do we use flashcards, anyway? When we read music, notes are not singled out and jumping all over the place. Why should we learn to identify notes like this?"
I sat down with a piece of new music and vocalized for her HOW I WAS READING IT as I played through. As I revealed my brain's processing of new music, she realized that the few individual notes that I note-spelled actually DID jump around randomly. Unlike the flashcards, the note being spelled was sometimes embedded into a chord or at the beginning of a run of melody. I took a highlighter and marked only the notes that needed spelling for successful reading of the song and challenged her (and the student) to quickly spell and play them. Now they knew almost everything they needed to play this new piece of music, too! The exercise looked slightly different but felt very much like using flashcards.
Want to try it with some new music? Here is a free copy (link) of Bach's Minuet in G and I marked the notes I want you to note-spell in the first 2 lines. The rest of the notes will be discerned from intervals, steps, and skips. Just do one hand at at a time to begin. As you move from one note to the next, ask "What interval do I need to jump? Am I going up or down?"
Let's Get Fluent
How fast is fluent? How quickly should students be able to identify notes? If a student is sight-reading and takes more than 1-2 seconds to play a note, she is going to struggle.
We divide the process into two steps. First is saying the alphabet name of the note and second is playing it on the keyboard. This year I challenge you to identify (say) all 27 note cards in one minute!
To be fair, you may find this to be way too easy for your child, or incredibly tough. Teachers value the learning process and focus most on the process and continued success. 1:00 to 1:30 is still the reference to aim for, but the real goal is for students to shave a few seconds off their own personal best time at each practice. Most teachers have an incentive club, like "In A Flash" club, to motivate students to improve their time each week. Your teacher might even offer a prize if you can improve your time by 0:05!
At Home
Most progress with note memorization will be developed during at-home practice. Here are some ideas to help you make great progress:
*On the Road: Like so much of what we're working on, daily work is best. Flashcards are special because they don't need to be at the keyboard! I keep a set in my car and my daughter knows that every time she gets in the car, she runs through the cards once before we turn on the radio. Maybe you can put a set in your purse and find a way to plant flashcards into your daily routine.
*Less Singing: You'll quickly notice there isn't time to sing "All Cows Eat Grass" or some other verse for each card. Like all the best mnemonics, the song lyrics will slowly fade away from the mental processing as the notes develop a meaning of their own. Students will start to only use lyrics on tricky notes, and eventually they have learned the note and stop needing lyrics. If your child is hanging on, encourage him to say only one word of the lyric ("grass", "boy", "apart") instead of singing the whole verse. Eventually just say the letter. The song is a means to an end.
*Tricky Pile: When I practice with my daughter, I give 2-3 seconds for her to say each note. If she cannot, I put that card in a "do-over" pile, which we go through a few extra times that day. This way, she's not focused too much on being timed, and the tricky cards get extra attention.
*Favorite Four: Some days we will pick out a small group of cards and really master them, flipping through the small pile over and over. Of course you can use lines or spaces, but I find other groups, too. For example, F is a note that my daughter always knows well, so we sometimes pick E, F, G, A and drill on just those for 3 minutes. She learns the notes well by learning how they relate to her well-known F. We might do the same with treble B,C,D,E since she knows treble C so well. In the bass clef, we pull out F,A,C and learn to recognize them as the parts of the well-known F-chord, then we pull out just E,F,G,A in the bass clef. You can choose any small groups you like, and take some time to really see relationships in the notes.
*Pick A Card: Hold the cards facedown, fanned out. Let your child pick each card to read.
*Road to Success: Lay the cards out in a long line. The student walks along, picking them up and reading them. You can make your own tradition for what lies at the end of the road. It could be the road leading into our out of the practice room, or leading to snack time! For another variation, have a student at each end of the road, coming toward each other very quickly. When they get to the middle, see who read the most cards!
*Memory: You will need both octaves of cards to be sure you have 2 of each letter. When flipping over two cards, shout out the letters as quickly as possible. They won't look the same- kids will actually have to read them to see if they are the same letter (from different octaves).
*Searching for… Lay the cards on the floor face-up. Say "I'm searching for….A!" and have her find it as quickly as she can, or have two children race. Or give harder clues like, "the note a third above C!"
*Quiz Mom: Have your child quiz you. Get some wrong on purpose to see if she can corrects you! if she doesn't correct mistakes, say "oh no! I tricked you!" and you earn a point for each time you trick her.
*Sorting: First decide how to sort. I take a sheet of paper and write ABC, and on another DE, and another FG. As quickly as possible, have her put the cards on their correct piles. You can change this game by writing words with bold letters, like "GinA is Cool" should collect only G,A and C cards and "Boy BAnD" would collect only A, B, and D cards. The goal is to get the cards into place quickly!
*Wild Card: Beforehand decide one letter is a wild card, and decide to do something crazy when you get to it. It's fun to anticipate when it's coming. We like to say that when we get to the wild (say, D) whoever notices it first gets to tickle and kiss the other person!
*Duck Duck Goose: This is most fun if you get other family members to play. Spread the cards in a circle. Everyone walks around them while you say "Duck, Duck…Goose!" Everyone drops down and reads the card in front of them as quickly as they can. Don't be the last one to say anything! Laugh about it, cheer for the fast kids, then stand up and move again. Try to make Dad always sit at the card he can't seem to remember. That's always funny.
*Online Fun: You can drill with MusicTheory.net's online flashcards here or drill play a variety of music games at Tonic Tutor or try the easy-to use topics at Musicards.net. I'd love to hear about other online games you found useful!
*Ipad Fun: Practice with phone and iPad games like Music Tutor or Noteworks. What are your other favorite apps for practicing note reading? There are dozens out there!
I hope you have some fun working on flash cards and learn to read them in a flash. Please tell us about which games you like, and share photos of your kids playing the games or practicing!
-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher
