Teaching Piano: Grand Staff Games

I've been using this large staff and gemstone "notes" with some of my piano students.

I like how these clear gemstones make it really easy to see how the notes fit in with the lines and spaces. I usually just play simple one-on-one games with these, depending on what the student is learning.

For Valentine's Day this week, I used these heart gems instead and it was a fun change.

Here is one quick game that I played with a beginning student. I made a dice that has step and skip written on various sides. We each had a different color heart, and placed our hearts at the bottom of the staff. Then we raced to the top of the staff by rolling the dice, and moving up a step or a skip at a time.

 As we played, we explored different concepts such as what it means to move up the staff, what a skip looks like, what a step looks like, and the invisible line that is in between the two clefs.