I've obviously been on a role, wow, I posted the above bright and early in the morning, and I'm back at my student preparation again this morning.

I have been going through every student that I have, and working out a plan for them.  I have been a violin teacher for 12 years, and have some piano students too but I'm always up for some fresh ideas.  It's easy to adapt the Blitzbooks Games material to my own needs.

I thought I'd share what I used the Blitz Theory Games book for last year.  Takes a lot of teacher preparation to start with, but once you do the initial prep, you can use the same thing year after year with the next lot of students coming through.

I did a "General Knowledge Workshop" with my students to prepare them for their practical examinations.

I had all my Preliminary Grade students doing the same pieces, so I went through each piece and pulled out all the general knowledge they needed to know, and wrote it all down for them. Then all they had to do was learn it for the workshop.  You'd be suprised what a little friendly competition did for these girls.  It's the fastest I've ever had students learn their theory/general knowledge.  There's no reason you couldn't use some of these games for your own theory or practical students:-

THEORY-A-THON

I divided my students into groups and gave them a white board, marker, eraser and a list of theory questions they had to answer.  I ended up with three groups of 2 students.  They got the "ready, set, go" and had to race against each other to finish, and the two who finished first had to run up the front and grab a prize.  Then we marked the questions.  If the winners answered all questions right, they got to keep the prize, if they didn't, it went to the next group who finished and answered all correctly.  If all groups got some answers wrong, it went to the group who had the highest number of correct answers. (They other teams got a small prize just for participating).

THEORY TWISTER

You need a twister mat, and some terms, or some giant dots on the ground.  Write your own terms on the mat (I used a whiteboard marker), then you need "right hand, right foot, left hand, left foot" on pieces of paper, and put them into a container, so you can pull them out again.  Also write the theory terms you have used on the twister mat on paper and put them in a separate container.  Begin the game by pulling one pice of paper out of each container, for e.g. "right foot on Allegro".  My students ended up with a case of the giggles not far into the game, and they said it was a lot of fun.

PASS THE THEORY PARCEL

Just like the traditional pass the parcel, but there is a theory question the student has to answer with each layer.  My prizes in each layer were lollies, so they had to answer the question correctly, or  I got their lolly instead.

CONCENTRATION

This comes from Samantha's book... match up the English terms with the Italian terms.

GK (General Knowledge) REWARD POINTS

I had two pages of questions and read them out as fast as I could.  The students needed to answer the questions, and the first to answer it correctly got a lolly tossed to them.  It's interesting to see how their minds work when they're under pressure.  We had some hilarious answers mixed in with the correct ones.  

Hope this helps or inspires you (and no, Samantha didn't pay me for this :) )

DD

Hi All,

It's back to that time of year again preparing for exams and trying to get students to learn their general knowledge.

I have another General Knowledge workshop coming up in a few weeks for my students sitting their exams at the end of this year, and I came up with a theory/general knowledge variation of a game my students play at our Christmas party.  Thought I'd share it with you.  It's called "Steal the Prize"

I'm writing out Italian and their corresponding English terms onto cards and laminating them.  Each student will get a couple of Italian terms.  I'm going to read out the English meanings, and throw in a couple of odd ones just to confuse them.  They all have to sit in a big circle, and in the middle will be a couple of wrapped prizes.  You have to have fewer prizes than the number of students.  If the student hears the matching English meaning to their Italian term called out, they have to rush to the middle, grab a prize and put it in front of them until all the prizes in the middle are in front of a student.  Then if their card is read out, they have to steal a prize from another student until there are no more cards to read out.  Once the cards are gone, the students with a prize in front of them gets to keep it.  It's great fun if you have lots of cards and keep reading them while students are moving around with prizes.  Keeps them on their toes.

I had 4 year old playing this at our music Christmas party with 20+ students altogether, and it was hilarious. The older students usually end up feeling sorry for the younger ones and don't take their prizes, but the younger students have absolutely no problem stealing prizes from the older students.

If you only had a small group of students, use fewer cards and one prize in the middle.  It will work just as well.

Enjoy

Di