A Chord Company

  Happy Valentine's Day!! A company of students came to learn about chords yesterday and more will come today because it is group lessons week. Yesterday they were my Piano Adventures 2B students and we all needed to review the keys of C,G,D,F; their scales, their tonic, dominant and sub dominant chords, the concept of inverting chords and how these chord sound.
   We started with a treble simple staff and Hershey's kisses to make triads. We used black disks under the chocolate kiss if the chord had a black note.
   Then we used a worksheet from colorinmypiano.com to write out scales and I,IV,V7 chords. Going over the visual pattern of a triad and moving it to a V7 chord seemed to fill some holes in these student's knowledge base.

   Lastly we used my Eggspert game to drill aural sounds of chords using Music Learning Community on my laptop. In "Wheel of Fortune" mode one person's egg would light up and they would listen to a pattern of I and V7 chords and find the matching written pattern.

   Eggspert was such a great hit that we played it in "Jeopardy" mode. I called out a chord name, they had to build it on the staff with their Kisses and then they could push the Eggspert button to get 5 points. Because of the heightened emotions some of these facts will stick better than if I explain them in a private lesson. Stay tuned for a report of my Tambourine Party, tomorrow.