Lesson 3

The girls didn't have time to practice this week so I introduced some new games to review content that we had already done.  

First we played Snake* with the Greek letter cards and this time when we were done I remembered to have them point and say the scale going forwards and backwards (I forgot the latter last week).  The main goals of this game are to get them really quick at recognizing  the Greek letters and to get them fluent saying the scale up and down.  

Then we sang the Nightly "Ni"* and went a bit farther this time.  Along with the Nightly Ni, we played Fine* and said the scale up and down each time after we finished one round of the game.  

Finally, we went through the Parallage Phrases together.  They did well on the phrases that were review although the younger student still found some of them to be a little tricky.  When we got to the newer phrases that practiced "up 2" I realized that they were depending on me to find the pitch.  I pulled out the Ni Pa Vou cards and we practiced going up and down and jumping around on ni, pa, and vou.  

This seemed to help but this was a sign to me that I hadn't prepared them enough vocally for the "up 2" symbol and/or the symbol comes to early in the progression of phrases.  I have been brainstorming new games for ear training as well as reworking the phrases so that more symbols come before the "up 2" symbol.  This would give me more time to teach the vocal skill of going up 2 notes.  Aside: It is important for students to know the first 12 notes of the Nightly "Ni" before learning the "up 2" phrase- if they are practicing daily (or nightly:) they will be singing a lot of up and down 2 notes (thi---vou---do)

I can sense that students are really drawn to the Parallage Phrases and I think it's because they fell like they are really chanting.  I think that it's good for students to learn 5-10 new phrases a week (2-3 new things) so that they feel like they are making progress.  I may add even more new phrases before the "up 2" symbol to allow for this.   

The other thing that we noticed was that the older sister was really good at some of the games, whereas the younger was really good at others.  They both noticed this and we talked about it.  I encouraged them to play the games together so that they could both get good at everything:)