More ideas for teaching notes on the treble clef staff

In our last blog post, five of our bloggers collaborated with some engaging ideas for teaching notes on the treble clef staff. In this blog post, we have more ideas from more of our bloggers!

From Melody: I love using chants to help my students learn the treble notes. As they’re learning and memorizing the chant, they’re learning and memorizing the lines and spaces, without even realizing it! Being able to name the lines and spaces quickly and easily is the goal, and once students are able to do this, their confidence rises and they are more excited than ever to sight-read new songs and piano pieces!

First, I teach each part of the chant by rote (first the lines, then the spaces), and as I say the letters of the lines and spaces, I play them on the piano to create an aural connection with the letters they are chanting. After working on the line notes, we follow up with a fun note-naming race worksheet, and then we do the same after learning the space notes. The students also love playing the line and space notes on the piano.

The first image shows the chant with the appropriate rhythms (for teacher use), and the second image shows the handout with visual elements that I give to the students. I try to incorporate as many different senses as possible to give students the best chance of remembering the the treble clef notes.

After students have memorized the chant and completed the note naming pages, we continue solidifying the line and space notes in subsequent lessons with a variety of fun (and sometimes silly!) activities incorporating their senses in multiple ways.

Click here to download the visuals above.

Ideas for teaching notes on the treble clef staff

Hello everyone! We are so excited to write the first blog post of our collaborative blog, Sing. Teach. Love. The blog is meant to be a place to share music education ideas for your classroom, written from the perspective of several different teachers and methodologies! For information on all of the teachers collaborating on the blog, see the “about us” section near the top of the page.

For this first blog post, we thought we’d share specific ideas for teaching notes on the treble clef staff! Today, we're writing with five ideas from five bloggers.

From Aileen: I absolutely love the app Staff Wars, which can also be downloaded as a computer program. Whether you have several ipads, one ipad, or one computer, this game is such a fun, interactive way to practice identifying notes on the treble clef staff! The best part of the app is that you can choose only lines, only spaces, only notes on the staff, and extended staff...as well as bass clef and alto clef! I've seen big improvements with the speed with which my students identify notes on the treble clef staff because of this app!

From Tracy: When it comes to teaching the treble clef pitches I am always looking for activities that get kids out of their chairs. One of my favorite activities is a matching game made from dollar store finds. In the teacher section of the dollar store I look for the matching sets of notecards in clever shapes like ketchup and mustard bottles, fish and fishbowls, peanut butter bread/jelly bread and many more.

Take one of the cards in the set and draw a treble staff with notes that spell out a simple word using letters of the musical alphabet. On a coordinating piece, write the word that matches the other piece. After creating a set, mix them up and have students match them up. For this activity, I recommend using a tablecloth, rug or shower curtain on the floor. This defines the space that students work in and keeps the pieces from spreading out across the room.

From Cori: I try to take any opportunity to get kids up and moving, so having a large floor staff is a must. I use painter’s tape directly on the floor, but you could also tape a staff to a shower curtain or an old sheet for easy clean up. (Or maybe you hit the music teacher jackpot with a staff rug!) There are lots of ways to use your staff, but my favorite is an easy bean bag toss. Students work in pairs or in a large group, tossing a bean bag onto the staff and naming the note where it lands.