Perfect Theory Test Scores!

Ana and her children, Jose (10-years-old), and Lesly (9-years-old) are pleased with their 101% perfect scores on the Texas Music Teachers Association Level Two Theory Test. Forty-five students in the five piano classes have taken the TMTA Theory Tests. The morning class, which has more time than the four afternoon classes, has completed the Level Three Tests, with everyone scoring 101%! On Tuesday next week (July 30), the morning class will take the Level Four Tests.

The tests have been extremely helpful in reinforcing concepts learned in class. Our first four classes all scored 94% or higher on the Level One Tests, but then the children in the fifth class obviously needed help reading notes, so I decided the easiest thing to do was to throw away the tests with their errors and come up with more creative ways of teaching the lines and spaces. It worked! The mnemonics I use to teach my Texas students don't translate in Spanish, so here's a few of the new ones on the treble clef:

Media C has a cinturon - a belt (the ledger line).

D is so triste - he doesn't have a belt.

E has a cinturon largo - a long belt. He's happy!

F is dancing because he has a space to dance in: Fa! Fa! Fa! Fa! Fa! he sings as he dances because he is also "Fa"! 

G is "Sol," and since "sol" means "sun" in Spanish, he gets rays drawn around him.

A sits inside an invisible large A.

B has a cinturon cinching his middle on the middle line when a large B is drawn on the staff.

I've learned that some of the adult students have not been in a classroom since first or second grade. A gentleman in his late 50's told me the piano lessons are his first time in a classroom situation since he was six years old. These adults never learned the alphabet. This means during the first four days - all in the first week, they dealt with learning A B C D E F G forwards and backwards and inside out, and applied the letters to the names of the keys and the lines and spaces of both the treble and bass clefs, in addition to learning to count the values of notes, their finger numbers, and to play six songs by looking up at my homemade posters of finger numbers and notes. 

And to their credit, they returned the second week, when they added to the brain stretching by also learning the traditional names: Doh, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and Si.