DirectionalBingoBig News – We’ve finally added a newsletter to our blog. After having several readers request it, we worked with our web developer and got it put together! Yay!  We promise it won’t clog up your inbox. We plan to send it out just a few times a month to let you know about new articles and resources available on our blog. To subscribe, just scroll to the end of this post or any other post and enter your email. Now onto the next big news – to celebrate this big milestone, we are sharing a free game! Woohoo!

Both of our Rhythm Bingo games (here and here) have been huge hits with our own students as well as our readers’ students. We wanted to create another bingo game that reviewed reading this time. This game is very simple with only skips and steps or 2nds and 3rds. Which makes it easy for beginners to jump into this game very quickly!

Since I teach a lot of private lessons, I like to pull these out as we overlap lessons for a quick 5 min. game. Two students with a box of doo-dads (I often just have my paperclips handy) and you’re ready to play! With my students, I like to have them practice saying “Up a step, down a skip…” and so on as we draw these cards.

As students advance, I turn this game into an ear training test. As I play the cards, they must listen then find the correct square. Make sure to show them the card at the end so they can double check it and remember that not all cards are on each bingo page. The final twist I like to use is to let students draw the cards and sight read the notes quickly for each other at the piano. Ear Training and Sight Reading?! Can it get any better! 😉

Hope you enjoy the game and our newsletter!

Download: DirectionalBingo

Author: Whitney

Whitney Hawker, NCTM, teaches group and private piano at Weber State University, Utah. She loves surprising students with the perfect piece or a new exciting game! After graduate school, she missed sharing ideas and resources daily with colleagues so she and her friend, Spring, began blogging together at 4DPianoTeaching.com