Online Music Games

http://www.emusictheory.com/practice.html

Expose Your Children to a Variety of Cultural and Musical Happenings

Summer is a fantastic time to expose your children to a variety of musical, art, and cultural events. Many communities have free concerts at the park, featuring a variety of genres. If you live near a university, find out about recitals that may be open to the public. The wider the variety, the better. Museums, art shows, dance festivals, celtic festivals...the list goes on and on.

I'll be forever grateful to my dad, who took his children to many cultural events even though money was very tight. I remember the thrill of sitting in a huge auditorium and being blown away by a full evening of Beethoven. He took us to the Ice Capades and to "The Nutcracker." We went to many community plays and concerts.

Largely because of this exposure, I have loved music, theatre and the arts all my life.

Creating Nature Sounds

This is a lovely little site, creating combinations of nature sounds.

http://naturesoundsfor.me/

Memorization

Memorizing piano music takes skill. In this blog I will share memorization tips.

This website gives you several basic memorization techniques to get you started:

http://www.nazzaromusic.com/6-quick-tips-memorizing-performing-music/

There are three memorization techniques that aren't mentioned in this article.

One is to play slowly. Playing slowly and counting the rhythm are helpful not only in memorization but they're important when learning to play any new piece.

The second is to use the articulation and dynamics from the start. Don't wait until you've memorized a piece to start including them. It's more difficult to re-learn something than it is to just learn it a certain way to begin with.

The third is to decide upfront that you will memorize a certain piece. Then as you learn it, section by section, memorize that section.

Once again, don't just learn (and memorize) the notes, rhythm, and fingering; add the articulation and dynamics from the beginning of the learning process. Memorize each section in its complete form.

Incentives!

I don't know about you but I love incentives. Piano students also thrive on incentives. This website offers several incentive ideas to help motivate the piano student:

http://www.pianodiscoveries.com/html/motivate.html

I'd love to hear your ideas for incentives for piano students!

Parents Can Help Piano Students be Successful

Parents and other family members can be of great support to the piano student. Here is a website with lots of suggestions to parents on helping their child maintain a positive attitude towards playing the piano--and particularly towards practicing the piano:

http://www.pianodiscoveries.com/html/parent_student.html

Musical Symbols Identifying

Here is a great website for quizzing yourself on musical terms, notation, and symbols:

http://www.pianodiscoveries.com/html/dictionary.html#topAnchor

Identifying Music Intervals

This is a good website for learning to identify musical intervals, both by sight and by sound. A good help in learning to identify a specific interval is matching a familiar song in which the interval is played the first few notes.

file:///Users/Marianne/Desktop/The%20Musical%20Intervals%20Tutor%20:%20Listen%20to%20Intervals.webarchive

Free Printable Flashcards

This is a great resource of free printable music theory graphics. If you can't negotiate the link, just type in the url. There's a long listing of various types of flashcards, etc. along the right side of the website.

http://linkwaregraphics.com/

Learning About Composers

I ran across this fun website that helps children learn about the great composers of the past--Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and the like. Click on Composer Time Machine.
http://www.classicsforkids.com/games/

Rhythm Matters

After a morning of giving piano lessons, I find myself counting rhythms out loud in my head for the rest of the day (1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and). Learning to play the correct rhythm is critical to being able to play the piano well. And thinking the rhythm in your head just doesn't cut it--especially for beginning pianists.

Even experienced pianists resort to counting the rhythm out loud for a tricky section of music.

Counting the rhythm out loud is also important when sight reading or when playing a piece for the first time. By doing so, the pianist can come much closer to what the piece was intended to sound like! He or she will avoid being tripped up by a complicated, or even a simple, rhythm just by counting out loud.

Before playing any piece of music, the wise pianist will always check the key signature (how many flats and sharps?) and the time signature.