The Giant Valentine – A Lesson Mashup

I’m always on the lookout for ways to make lessons more interesting. Here’s what worked this week.

I cut out lots of hearts out of different colors of paper. On one page, I actually had a heart template, but I quickly discovered that it’s a whole lot easier just to make a random fold in your paper and cut hearts in random sizes.

On the back of each heart I wrote things like:

• ​Sight Read
• Improv
• Student’s Choice of Past Song
• Current Song – Right hand only
• Current Song – Left hand only
• Rhythm Challenge (this means they pick a random rhythm out of my rhythm cards and clap it back)
• Note Challenge (this means we open a music book at random, I randomly place my finger on a note and they tell me what it is)

I also wrote some that were specific to each student, like a measure number or a phrase that was causing difficulty.

During the lesson, they picked hearts from the pile, do the challenge and tape it on to our Giant Studio Valentine, which formerly was just blank piece of poster board.. The picture above was early on in the week, but we ended up with it covered with hearts, and the kids enjoyed approaching the practicing in a new way.

**This post originally appeared on my other website here.