Reading the notes on the treble clef is a skill that many self-taught fingerstyle guitarists don't get around to mastering. It's important, however, to learn to read and recognize the notes on the treble clef. This is an activity or game that you can use to improve your recognition of the notes on the staff written with the treble clef.
Mastering the Notes on the Treble Clef
Musical Tic Tac Toe is a fun and engaging way for you to improve your note reading. I got this idea for a game to learn how to read music from Janice Tuck at the Fun Music Company. In this article you will learn how to play the game, as well as how to use a Bingo Card generator and some images that I've provided to create your own Tic Tac Toe card.
How To Play
You place a card with nine squares filled with musical notes on a table and compete with your friend to see who can make a complete line first.
The game of tic-tac-toe is normally played by drawing Xs and Os on a sheet of paper with nine empty squares. In Musical Tic Tac Toe, each square contains a musical note and can be covered with a token or drawn over with washable marker.
You must name the note before claiming the square with a token. The person who manages to make a complete line with the tokens wins the game.
You can use any sort of tokens to cover the squares. Because I teach guitar, I use guitar picks or Monopoly pieces. You can ask your student to play with picks while you use Monopoly or Clue props, or vice versa.
You can play this game as many times as you like, at the beginning or the end of a lesson.
How to Create your own Bingo Card
Follow the instructions below and you should end up with a bingo card that looks like the image below.
It is very easy to create a Musical Tic Tac Toe sheet with the Picture Bingo card generator provided by ESL games.
Head over to http://www.eslactivities.com/picturebingo.php to create your cards. Scroll down to the BINGO card generator. A standard tic-tac-toe is a 3x3 grid with nine squares, so from the drop-down menu choose 3 rows and 3 columns and the "total pictures on card" box will be automatically updated to show "9".
Next, you will need a bunch of note images to use. I've created a handy folder with images - click here. Download the ZIP file and extract all the images to one file folder. Now when you click "Continue" on the BINGO card generator page, a popup will ask you to enter your images. You will have to point your browser to the appropriate folder and add images one at a time. Be sure not to upload the same image twice! You only need to upload nine images as that is the number of squares available for our Tic Tac Toe.
When you have finished adding all your images, click continue. Be sure to select the proper paper size (letter or A4) and make sure Free Space is set to "no". Click on continue and then you're done!
Creating Multiple Cards
I recommend creating multiple bingo cards in order to challenge your students. That way the student does not get used to naming the same note one the same square out of familiarity.
Watch the video
For more help and for step by step instructions you can also watch the video below.
Please share your thoughts in the comments and let me know what games you enjoy playing with your students!
