Free 4th of July Music and Activities: A Piano Teaching Resource Roundup - Updated

Piano students love to play familiar songs and over the years I've collected several free patriotic themed songs and activities to celebrate the 4th of July in addition to pulling out some of the patriotic/march music in my library.  I have listed them below in general order of difficulty including some of the teaching concepts included in the music/games.

Solfa Ear Training Activities for Piano Teaching

Singing in piano lessons has many benefits.

It fine-tunes a musician's ear-training skills. This enables them to play melodies by ear as they recognize intervals quickly. It also speeds up the ability to transpose music to different keys. I've found that my piano students who are willing to sing as they play self-correct errors in their playing more quickly than those who don't.

Piano Lab: Tonal Centers and Modes in Music

Most classical and pop music is based on the familiar major or minor scale patterns also known as Ionian and Aeolian  modes. Less often used modes create a variety of moods.  

Listen to examples in this video of how  switching the tonal center of a piece to a different starting note of the C scale creates a different feeling.

Musical Cadences Piano Lab and Free Poster

What is a Cadence in Music?

Cadences in music are usually the two chords at the end of a phrase.

You can compare them to punctuation marks in sentences. 

Some phrases leave you feeling like the song isn't finished. What comes next?

Other cadences sound final like you are finally at the end of the song!

Introducing 5 Types of Cadences

Click Teoria.com Cadences to listen to the samples of different types of cadences.

Perfect Authentic: V-I Sounds like the end.

Imperfect Authentic: V-I + inversion Sounds like the end...but less final than perfect.

Elementary Piano Teaching Videos for Flipped Learning

After teaching piano lessons for over 15 years I've compiled a list of my favorite short videos for introducing beginning music concepts to piano students.

These brief videos are a great way to introduce or review musical concepts during piano lab and at group lessons.

To make the concepts stick even more, I invite students to engage by doing motions, creating artwork or singing along as appropriate. This multi-sensory approach reinforces the ideas more deeply.