Music Mind Games
Music Mind Games is currently a required part of the group lessons and is included in the Violin program.
MMG is comprised of a curriculum of more than 200 cooperative games for teaching music theory and reading, created and developed by Michiko Yurko. Students learn sophisticated concepts involving rhythm, dictation, note reading, and sight singing in the form of imaginative games. Thanks to a nurturing teaching philosophy, sequential pedagogical concepts, clever materials and mind-stimulating games, students grow to love and be excited about music theory.
The materials are used to help students learn:
- the musical alphabet and intervals (e.g. seconds, thirds, fifths)
- solfege
- how to place clefs correctly on the staff
- note names on the staff using various clefs (treble, bass, alto and tenor)
- melodic and harmonic dictation
- a fun vocabulary to make it easier to understand rhythms
- the values of basic notes and rests and their relationship to each other
- to keep a steady beat when reading rhythms
- to recognize and read note groupings
- fun Blue Jello hand signs to help understand rhythms easier and improve memory and comprehension of how notes and rests are drawn
- to sight-sing with Curwen hand signs
- to arrange notes and rests into measures in various time signatures
- to clap simple and complicated rhythms
- the meanings of musical signs, symbols and terms
- key signatures
- scales / triads / chords
- the relationship between the staff and various instruments
For more information about Music Mind Games, please visit the MMG web page: www.musicmindgames.com