16 mm Music Dice

Comprehensive List

I've added more music dice to The Practice Shoppe and now I can see it can be overwhelming to know the differences between all the dice, so hopefully I can outline all my dice here in a blog or two as well as give you some ideas on how to use them during practicing and teaching.

First of all, there are two sizes, 16 mm - which is a standard size dice.  I also have 25 mm - which is larger and can fit more details but is also more expensive.

Here is a list of all the 16 mm. dice I have in stock today (I've colored all the rhythm dice to make them easily distinguishable) in a basic order of simple to more complex:

Light Green Rhythm Dice

Super basic, just beamed eighth notes, quarter notes and quarter rests. Get a bunch of these and have the little beginners start clapping and counting.

Brown Rhythm Dice

The basic rhythms above with added half note, dotted half note, and whole note.

This is a great die for playing games where the kids don't have to know fractions like "Roll 100" and "Rhythm Race"  I also play "Shut the Box" and "Rhythm Chemistry" with these dice.

Blue Rhythm Dice

These are the first rhythms I teach my beginners out of the book Rhythm Train.  They are also the rhythms learned with Let's Play Music.  Great for composing and counting.  

Orange Rhythm Dice

Start learning how to count the eighth note and eighth rest.  These dice are harder to use for composing with beginners because the eighth note and eighth rest add some half beats.  But a "Rhythm Race" game is perfect to start introducing the half beat.

Magenta Rhythm Dice

These dice have everything from the eighth note to the whole note, with the fractional notes (eighth note and dotted quarter note.)  This is a great die for identifying different types of notes playing the game "Roll 10."  It's also a great "Tic Tac Toe" and "Bingo" die.

Purple One Beat Rhythm Dice

I love using these dice for composing because the rhythms are variable, but each side is only one beat.  This way you can easily fill measures and learn the tricky dotted eighth-note rhythms.

Red Rhythm Dice

 

This is very similar to the magenta dice but it adds a sixteenth note (and eliminates the dotted quarter note.)  I love to use these dice to play the game "Musical War."  It's also a more complex "Rhythm Race" game dice, dividing the beat into 4ths with the sixteenth note.

Green Rest Dice

This dice mirrors the red rhythm dice but with rests.  This would make the game "Musical War" more complex.  One person plays with the red, one with the green.  You could also play "Musical War" with only the green dice.  This is a great die for identifying all the different kinds of rests.

 Blue Rest Dice

 Here is another super basic dice with only a quarter rest, half rest, and whole rest duplicated.  

 Light Green Rest Dice

This die is on clearance and won't be around much longer.  It is pretty much the same as the green rest die above, but it has a 32nd rest (and no dotted half rest.)

Lavender Dotted Quarter Rhythm Dice

These next few dice are great to use when learning and teaching about the time signatures 3/8, 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8.  

Light Pink Dotted Quarter Rhythm Dice

 Gray Dotted Quarter Rhythm Dice

 Roman Numeral Chord Dice 

 This has been one of my ideas for a long time and they are brand new so I haven't played with them much.  I hope to use these to initiate composing and a discussion on the basic chord progressions.

 Accidentals Dice

Pair these dice with the Lines and Spaces dice to learn the names and locations of all the notes on the staff.

CGDAE Dice

I initially got these dice to roll to determine which string to play a finger pattern on with my students.  But, I also realized after I've played with these that they are the first five keys on the circle of 5ths and also the notes in the C major pentatonic scale which is really fun to compose with.

 Dynamics Dice

Here is another dice to use with the game "Roll 10" to teach students how to identify the different dynamic symbols.  It's also fun to roll and play a passage with whatever dynamic that is rolled.

Clefs Dice

Test your knowledge of all these clefs when you pair these dice with the Lines and Spaces dice.  Can you roll and name the note?

 Intervals Dice

I originally made these dice to help teach intervals on the violin or piano.  It's also fun to play and practice whatever measure you roll (4th measure, 6th measure, etc.)

Caroline's Crazy Game

Now that school has started it's nice to get into a good routine of practicing again.  My 5-year-old is in half-day Kindergarten which is perfect for a young Suzuki student because we have all morning free to get our practicing done.  It makes my heart smile when I hear my five-year-old going through all her pieces for fun, even if I haven't asked her to.  She loves to play the violin!  I believe this is why it's important to leave the violins out where they can pick them up and play them anytime.

I made this game months ago.  After several days of productive practice, we'll pull out this game as her "reward" for good practicing.  This has a lot of squares specific to what we are working on.  What she likes about it is all the pictures of the dice we use during practicing.  She LOVES to roll the dice!  We get some review done with the Book 1 review dice and Twinkle dice.  We play Roll-10 when she lands on the notes dice.  When she lands on the eighth note we do a little bit of note reading.  Her favorite is making a silly face whenever she passes the silly face halfway through the board.  It's just a silly little game, but it's a great reward practice session!

I have both Caroline's Crazy Game and a blank Crazy Practice Game available to download online.  I laminated my board so we can use and reuse it over and over again without it getting too trashed.  I love these games!

Memorizing All Major Key Signatures

As the newsletter editor or the Suzuki Association of Utah newsletter, I get to read a lot of great articles about teaching.  I particularly liked this one from the SAU Flute VP about memorizing key signatures.  This is one of my goals for my Book 4+ students this year.  

I was also thrilled because I just received a new shipment of key signature dice.  I've had the dice with the basic key signatures (C, G, D, A, F, and B-flat), but I've had several requests for the more advanced key signatures, so here they are!

Memorizing All Major Key Signatures

By Katrina Young

Since the Utah Suzuki Flute players are learning their major scales for our SAU Sweet Scale competition on October 12^th, I thought I would include some tricks and incentives that have helped my studio in the past to learn and memorize their scales. 

For visual learners:  I adapted this idea from Cindy Henderson.  Cindy includes in her student flute journal the note names of the scales written out with the sharps and flats circled.  I realized that some of my students would respond better with color and being able to focus on only one scale at a time.  I made these major scale flip charts for my students.   If you would like to make a set for yourself, they can be downloaded here.          

 We discuss how each scale is like houses on a street.  For example, “E street” has two sets of sharp houses that live next door to each other.  The “F# street” has only one house that is not sharped on the entire street!  When we venture into the flats neighborhood, we discuss how flats also like to live next door to each other.  These cards help students see and recognize the patterns of major scales.  To make these cards, simply print onto white cardstock, cut on the black line, punch a hole in the corner, and place on a binder ring.  I arrange the scales on the ring based on the circle of 5ths for my students.

  

For Kinesthetic learners:  I give these students the following worksheets.  By writing down the letter names of the scales themselves, they understand how the scales are formed and why we have a circle of 5ths and 4ths. Using the sharp major scale worksheet, I walk students through how we move around the circle of 5ths.  We start with the C major scale.  Have students count up to the 5^th note of the C major scale (G) and this is how we find what the next scale will be around the circle of 5ths.  They fill in the next set of boxes starting with G.  To find what note will be sharped in this scale, the rule is to always add the sharp to the 7^th note or degree of the scale.  In the G major scale this is F#.  When the worksheet is finished, it leaves students with a handy chart to refer back to.  You can download these worksheets here.

Make up a sentence to help you remember the circle of 5ths and 4ths:  Cindy Henderson uses these sentence “gimmicks” in her studio.  For the sharp keys in order around the circle of 5ths she says: 

                                    #        #

God Destroyed All Earth By Fire of Course.

                    # of sharps in key: 1      2               3   4       5   6         7

For the Flat keys going around the circle of 4ths she says: 

                                                 b       b    b        b                b               b

Fat Boys Eat Apple Dumplings Greedily of Course.

            # of flats in the key:  1    2       3    4        5               6                7

My own eight-year-old daughter made up a sharp order sentence the other day.  It is silly, but it helped her memorize the order in one day:  Good Dogs Always Eat Breakfast Fastly and Cleanly!  Make up your own sentence!  It will stick in your head better.

Make an incentive to learn them:  Each student in my studio has a fishy scale card from susanparadis.com.  As they pass off one of their scales, I fill in a scale on their fish card.  Once they learn all of their scales for the sweet scale competition, they will get a box of Swedish fish!  Sometimes, incentives such as these really help when things seem hard to learn. 

Practicing Game Board

Today is Sunday and our kids don't typically play with friends because it's a family day.  However, my 3-year-old's best friend lives next door and it's very easy for them to meet and play outside without us knowing.  Today was one of those days.  When I found her making a "nest" in my front yard out of all of my beautiful daffodils I knew she wouldn't want to come in to practice - but it was time.

Because of this, she wasn't too happy, but I had a fun game up my sleeve.  We are practicing twinkles after twinkles every day.  They are slowly getting better, but it's still not time to move on.  Because of this practicing is becoming hard for the little one so I'm having to find creative ways for her to want to practice.  I've had these music dice for a while.  Each side is half of a twinkle variation.  I made a game board with the corresponding rhythms.  She got to choose her favorite Japanese eraser as her game piece.  She then got to roll the rhythm die and move it to the matching rhythm.  We then played the twinkle that matched the rhythm.  Some rhythms (like 4 16th notes) can be used for more than one variation (var. A or var. E).  Overall it was a very successful practice and she was so happy when she "won" (got to the end of the chart.)

Well, the other girls saw these games and wanted to play as well.  For the older ones, I had a blank game board that was laminated.  I used a dry-erase marker to write various portions of the practice.  6 year old picked her Japanese Eraser (a panda body with a giraffe head.)  She also chose a big green die to roll.

My 10-year-old had a longer chart because she has much more to practice.  Because of this, she got to use a 10-sided die.  Since this game is a game of chance as to what they will practice some things got skipped and conversely some things were played multiple times.  Because of this, it wouldn't be an ideal way of practicing all the time, but it sure was fun for a sunny Sunday afternoon.  The great thing about these game boards is that you can make up your own rules!

You can find the music dice for sale here.  

There are lots of other fun dice for sale here.  
You can find tons of fun Mini Erasers for sale here.

You can download the game boards here.

Have fun!

Music Dice

In the fall of 2012 I received my first shipment of music dice and have been so excited to use these and sell these at The Practice Shoppe.  I saw a version of them online, but couldn't purchase them and thought they were a fun addition to teaching music.  I had a group of parents and teachers play with these dice for a few weeks and then asked for some ideas on how to use them.  Here are some of these ideas:

Musical Notes Dice:  These dice are notes in the pentatonic scale.  The pentatonic scales is the basis of most of American folk music and combined together can create very musical tunes.  I've used the C pentatonic scale for these dice because they are the easiest to play on the piano (C, D, E, G, A, and C).

• Use these dice to randomly create a melody.  Roll one die several times or use 4, 5 or 6 and see what melody you come up with.  Use this with the rhythm dice, or create your own rhythm to come up with a basic theme.  Then you can elaborate on that theme by repeating it, adding notes, changing the rhythm, creating variations, etc.  This could be the very basic start to composing a piece.  
• Roll the dice and name the notes.  This would be similar to using flashcards, but it would reinforce only these 6 notes.
• Use the die to determine how many places that note can be played on the instrument - and then how many octaves could be found with the same note.
• These dice would be good for deciding which scale to play in a group setting.  Or, it could be the starting note of an easy piece - to help with transposing on the instrument.
• "Play it, don't say it."  Roll the die and play the note on the instrument instead of saying it.  The dice adds a dimension of tactile learning that flashcards don't have.  This is great for the "hands-on" learner.
• For violin students, roll the die and use that note as the starting note using 1st finger (playing in different positions) of a scale or piece.

What are some ideas?  I'd love your comments!

You can purchase these dice exclusively from The Practice Shoppe at this link.