Large Staff Fun - And A Printable!

I mentioned before how I made my large staff. Seriously, we use this thing all the time! It is great for working on space/line notes, note names, intervals, just about anything!

Today I'd like to show you how I use it to work on scale degrees and chords. I made these circles to fit on the lines and spaces so that we could "label" our "notes." Here we have a scale all written out (minues the accidentals, I know...we weren't too worried about that at the moment!) with the scale degrees, and we worked on building the primary chords for that scale.

As you can see in that first picture, I have more circles made out to cover every Roman Numeral that we might need. Or at least, all the ones I could think of! This way we can always use them to review major/minor chords, intervals, etc.

Now, to make mine, I just used card stock and some colored markers and did it all by hand. It was simple. Sometimes I like to do things by hand rather than print everything off the computer. But some of you may prefer to have these handy to print out, so I also made them into a printable for you. Aren't I nice? And I even have one in black and white, to be printed on colored card stock, and one in color, to be printed on white card stock. Aren't I even nicer?

Black and White Circles:

And Color Circles:

Each file is two pages, one with Roman Numerals and one with numbers. The circles are 4.45 cm. in diameter, to give you an idea of the size.

I'd be delighted to hear how you use these circles!

Teaching Aids: Grand Staff

Someone asked me to share how I made my staff sheets mentioned in this post. I use these over and over while teaching, as there are always things that need to be reinforced on the staff.

Here is a picture of the treble and bass staves I made when I was in college:

All I did here was take a black Sharpie to a piece of white cardstock. I use a ruler to (try to) make my lines evenly spaced and straight. I penciled it all in before I made it permanent, as my artistic ability is as lacking as my creative juices! :) I find these staffs plenty big enough to fill in note names, practice drawing notes, teach the stem rule, etc. Because they are laminated, we can write on them with dry-erase markers and use them over and over. I also made these notes and time signatures out of cardstock and had those laminated as well. This way a student can arrange measures of their own and then play them.

Here is my large staff, drawn on a poster board. I made this the same way as the others, only on a bigger scale. I had to use a yardstick instead of a ruler. :)

I cut the circles you see out of colored cardstock to fit this staff. I put numbers on some of them for a student to make major scales with scale degrees, or to make chords and intervals.

If you need a smaller staff, Susan Paradis has some printable ones on her site. (Scroll down this page to find the different ones.) Some have fun graphics, but there are plain ones as well. I have several of these laminated as well. I often pull them out at a moments notice to be able to demonstrate things on the staff without messing up my student’s book.

Hope this information is helpful! Has anyone else done DIY projects like this?