Green Turtles #3

NEED TO KNOW

Green Turtles #3: Your kids were great this week! We played the red chord! And we used the correct fingers!

RED CHORD CORRECT FINGERING: Your little piano player should have red dots on the fingernails of their THUMB (finger #1), MIDDLE FINGER (finger #3), and PINKY (finger #5) of their right hand. These are the fingers that are used to play the RED chord. Some kids were a bit wary about my drawing on their fingernails and worried that you'd be mad. I promised that if you are mad, you'll be mad at me and not them!

CHORD HELPER: Now is the time to start using your Chord Helper. Check out this video for how to get it ready if you need a visual. (You have a new and better version of the Chord Helper, but the prep is the same! Just pull out the shaded portions instead of the ones with an X.) Or you can use the stickers so that they stay on the keyboard and don't get lost, that works too. I don't care what you use, but I do care that you use something! Solidifying the red chord is hard work and these visual assists are going to be like training wheels!

Here is a visual of what the keyboard should look like if you use the Chord Helper  (if you lose your Chord Helper, I can send home another one, or you can print one from the website here):

And what it should look like if you use stickers (again, if you need more stickers, let me know!):

MORE ON THE RED CHORD: It is going to be tricky for some kids to press down ONLY on the 1-3-5 fingers. We'll keep strengthening those fingers and soon it will be easier. If they need to use their left hand to brace the other two fingers up (or just the 4th finger... that's the trickiest one!) while they play, that's okay. The most important thing is that they are using the correct fingers. Some kids were trying to use their index, middle, and ring fingers or their thumb, index, and middle fingers because they are naturally stronger. They could play the chord better now, but it'll make for problems down the road. Check out this blog post about muscle memory and how important it is. 

BEAD BAGGIES: If you send the bead baggies back with your kid (just clipped in their workbooks), I'll reuse them. If you don't, no worries. I'm not keeping tabs on them, but will reuse anything that comes back!

GOOD TO KNOW

KIT KAT KEYBOARD: Now that we've mastered the black keys, we're starting on the white keys! We will use the black key pattern to learn the names of the other keys. It is important for them to look closely and frequently at the keyboard to reinforce the keyboard geography. When they are hunting for Cs and Fs, don't give them too many verbal cues, just the key phrases of "find a group of 2, down one is C" and "a group of 3 leads to F, yippee!"

C POSITION CHANT: We also learned C Position this week. Our right "Thumb on Middle C and each finger on a key!" This is the position to play the red chord, and will be the position we use for most of the things we do in 2nd year. We practiced (and will repeat every week!) floating our bubble hands up, then landing them on the keys at C Position.

FUN TO KNOW

INTERVALS ARE TURTLE SHELLS: When they're stacked up nice and neat it's called a third!