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Kids love writing on the board. I don't know what it is about it, but when I ask a student to write on the board it's as if I just offered them a trip to Disney World. We can do the most boring exercises and it's a bazillion times more fun on the board. 

In the picture above, I wrote in the first four strings on the guitar in the staff (in black) and had my student write out the rest of the notes in green. (Different color markers are also really exciting for some reason!) He, like many of my beginner students, has been having a hard time identifying notes on the staff and the guitar. I find with young students (under age 10) that they often guess instead of taking a few seconds to think about what the note is. 

Before having him write on the board we played the yet unnamed Game 2 to let him work on notes on the fretboard. A new issue for me with younger students is having them excel at the games that we play, but struggling to make the application to guitar. I hope that after a few weeks of games that they will be able to transfer the knowledge over to actual playing situations. It's great to see the light go on when they play games and finally understand a concept, but I'm really looking forward to seeing them make the transition within the normal lessons and at home. 

So far I'm really enjoying incorporating games into lesson times. I'm using our short 6 week summer term as practice so that I can work out some of the kinks before jumping into our full semester in August. I'm in the process of buying a small rug (5'x7') to make into a giant guitar fretboard. Stay tuned. 



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