7 Games to Spice Up Your Student’s MidYear Learning

The holidays are long over, which means the second half of your program year is already off and running. Or is it? Your students may still be feeling a bit sluggish with the colder temperatures that are still hanging around and need a little extra spark to quickly re-command their attention spans. With festival and competition dates looming, there is no time to waste.

Need to spice up your midyear music ed routine? Try one of our seven game inspirations below:

Snowball Race:

• Take pieces of paper with music note letters (A-G) on them and crumple up each one like a snowball.
• Give each student staff paper and designate how many notes they have to dictate on the staff.
• Students then run to get one snowball at a time (wherever in the room they are laying) and draw that note on the staff before crumpling it back up and throwing it and picking a new one. (Sometimes they really like throwing it at other students like a snowball fight.) Challenge them to see who can finish first.
• Optional expansion idea – students can then play their song creation.

Baseball:

• Create a makeshift ‘baseball diamond’ using paper or music stands. If you have a ‘music staff’ carpet, bring that to the center of the ‘baseball diamond’, otherwise create one using felt pads on poster board. For best results, make sure you can position a smaller clef run on the front of the staff carpet. You can also change which clef you use to help them practice note identification in other clefs.
• One team hits a plastic or rubber baseball towards the staff, with the goal for it to bounce on the staff to form a “pattern of notes”.
• While the student is running the ‘bases’, the other team has to run to the keyboard and play back the pattern that the ball had just hit on the staff.
• The other team cannot start playing the pattern until the ball stops bouncing. If this happens, then you must call a foul and instruct the student to ‘hit’ again.
• If someone on the opposing team catches the ball, the student is considered ‘out’. Each team can bat up to three outs, then switches to the other team.
• Optional expansion idea – change up which instrument is played; a xylophone, marimba, etc.

Racetrack:

• Create six lanes with seven to ten spaces using blank sheets of 8 ½ x 11 inch paper and assign your students across six teams. Place a  3 x 5 inch question card on each space. Color code each card by question type – green can be a history question, blue can be rhythm, etc. and assign a point value for each question.
• Give each team a plastic toy car. Ideally have one color car allocated per team.
• Students throw giant dice and whatever number comes up, they advance their car the corresponding number of spaces.
• At each space, the team turns over the question card and responds accordingly. Assign points for each correct answer or completed response.
• If they don’t answer correctly, the team has to wait until their next turn to roll the dice again. You can allow them a second chance to complete the card, and then deduct a point as a small penalty.
• Optional expansion idea – students on other teams can use points to ‘buy’ an extra turn.

Theme and Variation Game:

• You have a student walk out of the room and change something about their appearance (untie a shoelace, change a bracelet to their other wrist, take off a sweatshirt, etc.) and then come back into the class.
• Have the class guess what was changed. (The student is the theme that stays the same, but walks back in as a variation of themself.)

Note Name Game:

• On a whiteboard, draw a note on the staff and ask your students to call out the name of the note as quickly as they can.
• The first person to call it out correctly gets a point. (Sometimes students blurt out a note name somewhat carelessly, so if you want to make it more challenging, only their first answer counts.)

Musical Hangman:

• Draw the musical alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) on the board.
• Challenge students to come up with as many words as they can using only the letters of the musical alphabet.
• Then play hangman using only words that can be spelled with those letters. (It’s not a hugely academic game, but it hopefully gets them used to what letters are in the musical alphabet and changes up the pace of lessons.)

Music Appreciation Feud:

• Start by teaching your students about a composer and highlight their “signature sound” in their pieces – what to listen for. But don’t PLAY the music for them (yet). Repeat this for 5-7 composers.
• After presenting the composers, divide students into equal teams. Then play a section of a piece of music that would match the description of one of the 5-7 composers you just taught.
• The teams compete, like family feud – with a bell. The first one to ring gets to answer which composer is the correct match. If they answer incorrectly, they get a ‘strike’. A correct answer garners them points. Assign points based on difficulty. If a team gets three strikes, the other team wins automatically.

Bonus Warm Up Idea:

Never underestimate the engagement of “repeat after me exercises”. Ask your students to repeat the notes after you say them out loud. (Ex. C-D-C-C) Simple, but especially good for beginners who only know a few notes and are still trying to figure out where to “place” the notes in their embouchure. It takes away the note reading aspect temporarily. You can also pick one note and play a rhythmic pattern for students to repeat, still working on the note placement, warming up the lips for brass, fingerings for most players, while also reinforcing tonguing.

Stay Creative

Even if you’ve played these or other games before, you can make small changes to keep things fresh. Or better yet, challenge your students to come up with some of the game questions, rules, or actions.  Happy learning!

Thank you to CutTime, a Band Directors Talk Shop business partner, and Karen Levins, K12 Music Educator at Owen J. Roberts SD – North Coventry Elementary and Megan Murphy CutTime Sr. Support Specialist

Let CutTime help you crank up your world-class, well-oiled machine and take away the time that you spend on administrative tasks and give you back the time to focus on developing good humans and musicians! If you would like to find out more about CutTime, contact us at support@gocuttime.com or via Online Chat at GoCutTime.com