Here are some tips for your next middle school music lesson plan which should help you to make your next  music theory lesson FUN.

As usual, let me know your sucess stories and  feel free to provide extra materials, ideas and comments of your own using the comments section below.

Tip #1 – “Musical Sums” and Worksheet Ideas

Middle School kids just love musical games, stories and puzzles- here’s a few “Musical Sum’s” and other activities you could use in your worksheets

Tip #2- “Scale Ladders” Game

Have you ever tried to teach Scale Degrees to a Middle School Class and found that they just don’t get it?Here’s a simple game you can play, designed for small groups that will help them to learn with minimal effort.

Preparation:

Make a Game Board template on A4 paper. You need 8 steps ascending on the page to look like a staircase or ladder.The “steps” should be able to fit a small scale degree flashcards inside.

Make some small counters with various scale degree labelled on them to use on the gameboard

Object:
To fill in each step of the ladder using scale degrees

Setup:
Face all counters down on a table or in a box. Each player receives a gameboard.

Directions:
Each player has a turn picking up a game counter and putting it onto their game card. First one to complete the ladder with scale degrees in the correct positions wins!

Tip #3 – “Pitch Bingo”

Bingo is just one of those classics that can be used over and over again, students never get bored of it and it can take as long or as little time as you like.

Here’s a musical variation of the game especially designed for the whole class.It is best suited to teachers who have experience in musical reading.  I used out print out loads of templates as pads and have them ready for those spare few minutes anytime I needed them.

Preparation:

Make up some bingo templates including the pitch and a check box

Make up some bingo tokens to be read out by the “caller” Explaining the pitch and the note.

Instructions:

Give out a bingo strip per student, or you could choose to make up pads of them for regular use in advance.

Have a caller draw out the tokens from the bag or box, or use another method of randomly selecting pitches.

The first student(s) to check off all the pitches is the winner and calls out “BINGO!”

Templates for these plus many other games are available in our Music Games product from the Fun Music Company, Printable Music Games. Click here to check it out »