Hi everyone! Stay safe in the slush tomorrow :) In person friends, I have a small piano gift for you next week for our final lesson of 2022!

Fiona

Flute of the Andes – We learnt about the perfect 4th interval in our last piece, and this song uses almost exclusively 4ths. This piece is also entirely Cs and Gs, except for one A. Have fun playing it up high to sound like a flute.

C Major Scale one octave scale with RH. Keep practicing! You can also warm up with broken triads in both hands. That’s when you play the 1,3,5 notes of a scale. Use RH 135 fingers, and LH 531. Use strong rounded fingers and don’t let your wrist collapse.

Jingle Bells! Awesome! Try doing a game where you see how far you can get without making a mistake. Then try and beat your record! I loveeeeeee how even and steady you play this. We’ll record it next week for your show and tell!

Marita

Joy to the World. Can be found here. Please play hands together. Great reading today! You’ve got this.

Jingle Bells. This is great! You should get one of your parents or your sister to video you playing this. It’ll be awesome to remember how well you played this arrangement this Christmas.

Broken triads. Practice C, F and G major (all white keys). Remember my cat walking metaphor: how they put their back feet exactly where their front foot just stepped. This is how our fingers do broken triads, our thumb keeps chasing finger 3 in the RH for example. Here’s a video to follow along with.

Sara

Dust off your D major formula pattern. :) Picture making sunglasses shape with your hands.

In the Spirit. There’s a few measures in the middle I wrote counts in for. Tidy up those and then keep working on the ending. Great job capturing the jazz swing feel.

Lemon Sherbet Rag. This is another one I’d show off to family! Your dynamics and articulations are accurate and impressive. Check what tempo you’re at just for fun!

You did an amazing job of performing Jingle Bell Rock today!! The video can be found here. You can trim our “should I play now?” “sure!” intro if you like, or keep it for charm.

Julian

Your new piece is I Am The King. This piece both hands are in G position (lowest fingers on G). You did a great job reading it in class today. Here’s a video of it in case you need more guidance. 

Rudolph. Try doing a game where you see how far you can get without making a mistake. Then try and beat your record! Hint: this will be more successful if you take a look through the piece before you play and kind of plan out what your fingers will do. (The only mistakes you make is doing steps instead of skips in certain spots) We’ll record it next week to share with your family :)

Sina

Your new piece is My Bicycle. ***It can be found here.*** It requires you to flip fingers over or under other fingers. When doing this, we don’t want to make a big movement out of it and raise our elbow all funny. It can be achieved with a level wrist by moving our individual fingers side to side. For example in the opening measures, the LH crosses finger 3 over the thumb. Using the thumb as a pivot point, just cross your finger over, like a ice skater doing a cross over. The first 15 seconds of this video will show you an example of how to cross your middle finger over EXACTLY like in this piece.

Frosty the Snowman or Jingle Bells. They’re both in the google drive so feel free to just read it off a tablet if possible. Have fun with it!

Daniel

You are now encouraged to play Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer :)

I Saw Three Ships – Ideas to make the pulse consistent hands together: Play LH while singing RH, play RH while tapping the LH/or reverse, record one hand to a click track to play along with etc. Keep in mind that with a click track, you’ll want to hear 2 clicks per bar as this is in 6/8. It’ll be, click 2 3 click 5 6.

Four Wheel Drive – quarter notes need to be really steady and on the beat. Notice how there are lots of ties over the bar line? To help us be able to perform those we must have the notes that ARE on the beat, really accurate. I encourage you play along to this video, there is full speed and then a slow version at 0:52.