If you are looking for something new to inspire your students, I suggest dinosaur music activities for piano lessons.

There is something about the lumbering historic creatures that entice children, and if you can couple dinos with music, you’ll have a recipe for success!

I recently used the Dinosaur Color by Music Symbols Boom Cards™ Bundle with a 5-year-old student during an online piano lesson.

I was really impressed with how engaged the student was throughout the activity, which is a testament to how wonderful this resource is.

Today I’ll be sharing how I use the Dinosaur Color by Music Symbols Boom Cards™ Bundle in different piano teaching scenarios, and specific tips on how to use this resource to make piano lessons more engaging for very young beginner piano students.

1. Using Dinosaur Music Activities for the Expected (or Unexpected) Online Piano Lesson with a Young Beginner

With adequate planning, we can ensure that parents and students ‘sign off’ feeling they had a useful and enjoyable piano lesson experience – even if circumstances dictated that the in-person lesson needed to be switched to an online lesson at the last minute.

To prepare for the unexpected online lesson with a young beginner, it’s helpful to have different resources that you save and use specifically for your online lessons.

This way, during the few instances you may need to switch to an online lesson, the student will be interested because it’s something out of the ordinary.

Having 5 or 6 resources gives you the flexibility to change activities every 5 minutes, which is realistic when working with students between the ages of 4-6, and especially during an online lesson.

The last thing we ever want is to be stuck trying to stretch out an activity that is not of interest or holding the young preschooler or kindergartener’s attention.

One idea is to use Boom Cards™ of varying categories (music symbols, note reading, notes values) throughout the lesson, in between other activities at the piano.

In addition to the Dinosaur Color by Music Symbols Boom Cards™ Bundle, here are two others that get used often in my studio (parents also like these because their child gets to practice spelling and math within their piano lessons):

• Halloween Music Boom Cards™: Halloween Music Math Addition Notes & Rests
• Fall & Autumn Music Boom Cards™ for Piano: Grand Staff Musical Spelling Words

These dinosaur music activities for piano lessons are just one bundle of many resources that I can pull out for an unexpected online lesson – even with a brand new beginner.

2. Tips for Using Dinosaur Music Activities for Piano Lessons with Young Students Online

For a brand new beginner with only a few or no lessons under his belt, start with the Music Boom Cards™ Color by Music Symbols and Definitions Dinosaur Scene from the bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons.

The objective (if the student asks) is to learn to recognize music symbols – just like they learn new names and faces at the beginning of a new school year.

How much more fun when they can learn these symbols with dinosaur music activities for piano lessons!

• While screen sharing the Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons in Zoom,
  • Option #1: Have a portable whiteboard handy so the student can see the screen – and the teacher –  while they view in side-by-side mode.
  • Option #2: Screenshare both the Boom Cards™ and an application such as Microsoft Word or One Note that gives you the ability to draw the symbols on the screen.

This is where the teaching happens: when you see a definition, for example, “3 beats or counts,” draw the symbol, teach the name and simple definition of the symbol.

Then the student searches for the symbol within the picture. (My 5-year-old student was so excited to search for the symbol and see what color the shape would become!)

For symbols such as 4/4, I chose not to go into lengthy definitions. I simply said, “This is called a time signature.”

With certain symbols I gave simple definitions, with a focus on what I thought the student could easily remember.

For an early beginner, the goal is to simply have the student become familiar with the music symbols; we are not expecting that the student will remember all of them.

For students ages 4-6 this is a great opportunity to incorporate practice with finding directions. If a student is having trouble locating a symbol, give hints that also allow the student to practice finding where the “top right hand corner is.”

For a student who already has directional skills, you could incorporate hints using directions “north, south, east, west” to add a fun challenge if it seems right for the situation.

Younger preschoolers who are learning about body parts will appreciate hints such as, “It’s near the dinosaur’s head.”

For one of your 5-minute lesson activities, the Music Boom Cards™ Color by Music Symbols and Definitions Dinosaur Scene might be plenty.

When I finished this deck of cards with a 5-year-old student, the student wanted to do another deck, but I decided to switch over to an ear training activity.

The next time we had an online lesson, I used the Music Boom Cards™ Color by Music Symbols Dinosaur Scene from the bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons.

Now the student gets to learn music symbols in a different way – seeing the symbol and searching for its corresponding term.

This is a great exercise for early readers as you can give hints (or answers) such as “Fermata – what letter does that start with?”

You might alternate between giving the student the first letter of the word to look for, or having the student sound out the first letter on his own – to keep the game moving along.

After using these two decks from the Dinosaur Color by Music Symbols Boom Cards™ Bundle, I would try the Music Boom Cards™ Color by Music Symbols and Terms Dinosaur Scene in a subsequent online lesson.

This is a good deck to use for review, to see what the student remembers from the previous online lessons. This deck is multiple choice, and the teacher still has the option to split the screen and draw the correct symbol to teach/review as needed.

The bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons can be used multiple times for any of your online lessons with beginners. It is a great way for the student to accumulate knowledge over time.

3. Using Dinosaur Music Activities for Piano Lessons with Preschool or Kindergarten Group Class

Are you interested in offering small group classes where preschoolers or kindergarteners can try out music lessons in a low pressure environment?

If so, I highly recommend checking out the Mini Music program (more on how it works with dinosaur music activities for piano lessons in a little while).

Mini Music is a pre-reading music course developed by experienced music educator and composer Paula Manwaring, (and published by Neil A. Kjos Music Company) and teaches basic theory concepts.

While it was originally designed for children ages 5-7, it can also be used for children as young as 4. Students don’t need an instrument at home, and there are no licensing fees.

I like the fact that it is a well-rounded, flexible course that allows young students to try out music classes with substance.

In addition to learning note values and intervals, students also learn useful skills such as being able to identify different instruments by sound.

Students who graduate from the course will have a head start in their private lessons.

Check out a video to find more information on Mini Music classes:

The bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons is a resource that can be flexibly used within Mini Music classes, or any small group music class with kindergarteners or 1^st graders.

You can introduce the decks based on my suggestions above, going over just one deck during a lesson. The students will enjoy taking turns, or working together to figure out the answer.

I highly recommend using a larger computer monitor that makes it easy for a group of students to see when you share resources such as the bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons.

The best part of the bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons is that it can be used with young students with no previous lesson experience and for small group pre-reading music classes where students are not expected to practice an instrument at home.

See Interactive Dinosaur Music Activities for Piano Lessons in Action!

Get a glimpse at all three Dinosaur Music Terms Boom Cards™ with these YouTube videos:

Get the bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons here.

Boom Cards™ are a wonderful resource to use in your online lessons and small group classes (if you’re new to Boom Cards™ check out Getting Started with Boom Cards™ in Piano Lessons here).

I use many of them for online lessons, and also assign certain decks for students to practice at home.

In addition to the bundle of Boom Cards™ dinosaur music activities for piano lessons, you can find all of Dr. Melody Payne’s Boom Cards™ here.

Have you ever done any dinosaur music activities for piano lessons?

What about Boom Cards™? Have you used them? I’d love to hear your experience! Leave a comment about what works for you!

Even more blog posts about teaching online piano lessons…

• 5 Online Activities for Online Piano Lessons
• How to Teach Online Piano Lessons
• How to Use PDF Worksheets on Your iPad During Online Piano Lessons