Talking Piano

I'm going to be demonstrating talking piano at the training today. It serves a dual purpose: many music concepts can be extracted from it, while it also serves as an excellent managment tool.

Talking piano not only gets wiggles out, but teaches children (to):

• move in space with self control
• to listen and react to patterns and changes in music
• hear and respond to cadence (V7-I)
• music has a steady beat (sounds may be steady and equal in length)
• quarter notes (ta)
• eight notes (ti-ti)
• sounds may be long or short (skipping)
• respond to mood of the music
• music starts and ends in silence
• dance integration

The video clips below are my first time meeting and teaching this class. As an established teacher of a classroom you may choose to move through the phases of talking piano at a different pace, depending on how much you need to focus on management and how expectations may already be established. I'll point out one of those examples relating to sitting down later in this post.

Stand up, sit down

stand up = ascending broken V7 chord (g-b-d-f), ending on G at the top

sit down = V7 blocked, with re as the top pitch(f-g-b-d), to blocked I chord in second inversion(e-g-c). The inversions are important, because they help children to hear the descending cadence more clearly.

Walk, run

Notice at the end of this clip, the students tried to hustle back to their assigned seats on their colored squares for sit down. This is an example of prior established expectations. The students were used to sitting down in their assigned seats, and didn't realize my expectation was different. I didn't realize immediately what was going, either, but later on I figured out what was going on. I simple explained to the students that in talking piano, "sit down" means you sit down right where you are, and they didn't need ot go back to their assigned seats unless I specifically directed them to do so. 

skip

A few keys for success:

• positive, specific reinforcement: to achieve a desired action or behavior, I chose to focus on students already doing that action or behavior. As soon as I praised that student with the specific details of what I was expecting, other students followed suit.
  **This management strategy helps to set expectations without having to state a long list of rules while you lose students attention. It also keeps things positive, and allows children the chance to make corrections without feeling like they did something wrong. Students who didn't quite understand the first time get to figure things out on their own. It gives students the opportunity to think for themselves. It takes away right and wrong, and the feeling of being unsuccessful, becuase instead of pointing out everything wrong, you're focusing on the positive.
• Pacing: Sometimes it's hard to know when to move forward, ignoring disruption, and when to stop and address it. There's no hard fast rule for this, but in general try to use the music as a mangement tool. If you keep the music going, keep the students brains engaged, management problems disappear. If what you are doing isn't working, try the opposite. 
• Practice: the more you try things like this, the more natural it will become.
• Transitions: once students are familiar with talking piano, you can use it for transitions from one activity to another, to line up, or just to get their wiggles out.

Extensions:

• talking piano provides a great foundation for notation.
• Dance integration: pathways, movement in space, etc.
• major and minor: play the rhythms to designate mood, and match movement to that mood