Étude Concentration Game

A young student and I put together a memory concentration game for Étude in Suzuki Violin Volume 1. We followed the format of the free download about peanut butter sandwiches, which can be found at the Practice Shoppe.

We made up a flash card for each snippet or phrase of the song and laid out our cards in the following array:

We put a number for each card on the reverse side so that we would know what order the song pieces came, in case we dropped the pile of cards on the way home from the studio.

My student has worked to pick out the notes that the cards represent,  and she had pretty much figured out by ear what the notes of the song were. There were a few sticky spots. Here is how we found the cards to be useful.

As my student worked through the song, I turned over those cards that I thought she had learned well enough that she would no longer need to refer to the card. What was then left on display were those portions of the song that needed more work, as you see:

My student can now focus on the remaining cards until she is able to turn them over as well.

We also thought of other ways to play with this game. We thought of organizing the array in a different display format, such as top-to-bottom or right-to-left column. The possibilities can be as many as we can invent.

Using a spaced repetition technique, every few days my student can attempt to play the song without reference to the notes side of the card. Any cards she forgets, she can leave up for a review on the n next day.

I generally do not like to encourage note cards like this, but I accept that this song can be elusive for some students to figure out by ear alone. This little game made the task fun!

Until next time,

Happy Practicing!

----- Paula -----

© 2018 by Paula E. Bird