Making Your Own Worksheets

We’ve talked here about where to find some good worksheets, and we talked here about how to use worksheets and when to use them. Today I’d like to talk about how to make your own!

I often make worksheets that specifically fit a need for one of my students. It seems like I had a hard time finding simple worksheets for my beginning students. Each method book introduces different concepts in different orders, and it was hard to find worksheets that were drilling rhythm, but didn’t use dotted quarter notes, just for instance.

So here are a few of the ways I made my own worksheets.

Plain old staff paper and a pencil. These things can do wonders. I found an amazing site where you can make your own staff paper to fit your exact need. So when I wanted really large treble clef paper, I could just make my own. Its so easy, and so convenient. With plain old staff paper and a pencil we can review note names, intervals, learn to draw notes and clef signs, etc, etc, etc.

Keyboard worksheets. I googled “keyboard picture” and came up with the picture here.

I have used it for so many things! I made a whole sheet with several of these on it that I use to talk about major scales, chords, and such things. I have used them with beginners to talk about whole and half steps. I also took and put little white boxes on the black keys so that we could mark on those too. That looks like this:

I also made a simple beginner worksheet with instructions for them to circle the groups of two black keys and then the groups of three black keys. We can number the keys, name the notes, and a whole host of other things!

Here are pictures of some of the worksheets I have made:

I will tell you a little secret...I make most of these in Pages. (An Apple program that would be like Microsoft Word.) Wow, aren’t I techy??? But because I just keep things simple, it works well for me most of the time. I really think simple is key, you don’t want a student overwhelmed and feeling like they are taking a test. You just want to review or enforce a concept. So I keep it simple for the student and simple for me, and use Pages. And no one will ever know! Well, except for you, now you know. I guess I don’t mind if you know.

What worksheets do you use? Do you have some tried and true ones that I don’t know about yet? Please share! And if you would like to use or see any of the ones I have mentioned above, just leave me a comment with your e-mail address and I will be happy to send them to you.