Interval School

Ah, the approach to note reading development. Much like LaDona's elusive quest for the perfect assignment sheet, I find that I am on a never-ending tightrope trying to balance intervallic reading with traditional line and space note mnemonics. A little too much in one direction and you have students plodding along as they stop to recite the bass clef line note chant. Too far in the other direction and you have students playing entire passages a step too high because they misread that third in measure 2.

Enter Fuzzy Beluga and his school of fish friends.

I made this fun little activity last week to help me observe how my method book students are doing with basic directional reading (3rds, 2nds and repeats). By leaving out the clef they easily focus on intervals rather than mnemonics. I have them recite as they go along, "G, up a step, up a step...". By doing three lines correctly they will reveal a mystery word like EGG or CAB.

If you are an iPad user and you want to make a reusable workbook in Noteshelf, then you can download these iPad images from my Dropbox. Here's a sample page, there are five of them in the collection.

If you prefer to print and make worksheets, then you can download this five page pdf, which has far less color to save on your printer ink. Here is a sample page of the print version:

If you teach group lessons, you might give each student a different page so everyone gets a different mystery word. And as a extra little bit of work, you could ask your student to add stems to all of the fish (in the correct direction of course).