Melody Match: a new game for Music In Our Schools Month®

Happy Music In Our Schools Month® (MIOSM®)! I love celebrating music in my classes with different games that can be repeated all month and challenge students to improve their scores (and covertly drill important music skills). Since my first year of teaching well over a decade ago I've been doing 2 games, Rhythm Battle and Disco Duel (described in this post) for MIOSM, but I've always wished I had something similar to practice melodic concepts. Last year I finally came up with something I like, and it's so easy to add to your lessons! 

This is nothing revolutionary... The basic idea of Melody Match is to see how many note letter names the class can identify in one minute. Depending on the grade it might be just treble clef on the staff, adding ledger lines, or treble and bass clef- this could even be done with solfege. A note comes up on the screen and I call on 1 student to name the note. They get one chance- if they're right the class gets a point and I pull up a new note, if they're wrong I go to the next student and continue until they get it right (or the timer ends). The total number of notes they identify correctly in one minute is their class score for that day, and they try to improve their score each time they have music class during the month of March (you could also do this like the way I run Rhythm Battle, and make it a competition between classes within each grade to see which class can get the highest total score). 

The key to this game is MusicTheory.net. If you haven't ever used this site as a music teacher, it is a goldmine! But what many teachers may not know is that you can customize exercises, and that's what I use for this game. If you aren't familiar with how to customize exercises, here's a quick tutorial:

For this particular game, the key setting to use is "challenge mode"! This allows you to set a timer of one minute (or whatever amount of time you want to give them) in the game so you don't have to keep track yourself. For example if I'm doing the simplest treble clef version, these are the settings I use:

These are the links for the different versions I've set up for my students (all with 1 minute timers): treble clef on the staff, treble clef from middle C to high A above the staff, and treble and bass clef on the staff. There are endless ways to adjust these for different games to practice pitch names! 

I'm so excited to have this game to add to our celebrations this year. It's quick and easy but it gives the students some great practice and it's fun! To see all of my ideas for celebrating Music In Our Schools Month, click here.