Birthday Group Lessons and Teacher Practice
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Birthdays & Teacher Practice
A glimpse at the highschool group
Happy Birthday Group Lessons!
Once a month, my private lesson students get together with their assigned group for ensembles, performance classes, or other themed activities.
For February, it is all about the birthdays!
Why February?
Well first of all, it is not my birthday month - it's all about the April Showers for me.
This just happens to be the best time of the year where it works out to have this event for my studio. There are not hurried preparations for recitals or evaluations yet, and it is a great way to bring color into the studio during the gray months of Ohio.
How Do We Prepare?
No one in the studio gets to escape the birthday fun. Every January, I pass out the amazing Amy Chaplin's Happy Birthday By Ear: The Ultimate Teaching Resource packet to every student. For the younger student's, we pass on the packet and I focus on just teaching them the main melody by rote.
Each week we build upon what was learned the previous week. Some students memorize the melody while some, who have done this before, add in the chords and some improvisation. This year, one of my older students transposed all of Happy Birthday into the key of E minor, which sparked some in-depth theory discussions. The result was eerily amazing.
My requirement for the entire studio is simple: that their version is memorized and that they are comfortable with it.
They might handle playing both hands together in lessons but get nervous in front of others. That's fine, they can stick to playing just the melody. Not only do I want them to learn the piece and complete the project, but I want this to be a confidence builder as well.
What Does Birthday Week Look Like?
The beauty is that teachers can put as little or a lot into this, the kids still enjoy it. I tend to go overboard, but the majority of what I do really isn't necessary.
Some ideas to make it fun:
balloons
cake / cupcakes
decorations
games games games!
We begin the group by playing music in the background while providing a Happy Birthday Symbol Hunt on each seat. I have pre-planned ice breaking questions to encourage chatter and energy.
Then, it's time to play! While each student is playing, I provide Happy Birthday Listening Coloring Sheets and Comment Cards to keep the others occupied. Sometimes we discuss what they heard in the performance and sometimes we don't, I just go with the flow of the class.
Bow for Cake - Yup, the bows in our studio at performances have been (ahem) lacking, so we review how to bow and in order to get their cake, they must have an adequate bow for it (and the audience must have adequate applause as well!)
For some classes, we did an ensemble. This is a great one to start with if you have never done an ensemble before. Some students shared space on one piano, and some had their own. I had some students play blocked chords, others play the tonics, some would play the melody hands parallel - really the sky is the limit with this one!
Lastly, we always end with a game. Usually, I try to pick one to go with our study. This time around I ended up letting the kids choose their favorites. My highschoolers and middle schoolers all selected Spoons with our homemade game cards while the younger kids overwhelmingly requested the classic Bang!
Do you do a Happy Birthday class? I would love to hear about it!
Happy Birthday Printables Here!
Happy Birthday Symbol Hunt.pdf
HBD_Listening_Coloring_Sheets.pdf
Happy Birthday Comment Cards.pdf
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