Note Identification Made Easy

This week I have been running my Mystery Music Camp again. It's a smaller, younger group of kids, but we're having a great time. I'm finding that I had to adapt quite a bit of the plan because there are kids that have NO musical experience. I quickly moved from teaching the notes on the staff, to teaching the musical alphabet forwards and backwards. I've been rapidly putting games together for the staff portion of the camp. I purchased these about a month ago and using a permanent marker, I put a letter name on two sides of these balls.
Then I just put together a couple of relays and had the kids run down to the balls and race to put a set together in order and then to put them together backwards. When they accomplished that, I had them put two octaves together to reinforce that "H" doesn't come next!

I also put together these flags. Again, I used relays to have the kids work their way to these flags and retrieve them in order, one at a time. I'm planning to use both these games in my Discovery (Pre-piano) camp as well. I'm making these flags available on my website here.

Super easy and super fun. Even though we're in the middle of a heat wave here in the Northeast, the kids are loving this!