Finger Number Bingo

Looking for some new ideas for the new year? Here is a game Finger Number Bingo. I was looking for a pre-reading piece for one of my piano students and some of the piano activity pages I saw had me thinking about how to incorporate them with my violin students. My brain seems to come up with these ideas when I am supposed to be thinking about something else or going to sleep. Any one else? I adapted a piano finger number game for violin finger numbers. It’s a game that helps reinforce left hand finger numbers for beginners, and practice partners can play easily with students at home. You don’t need to know music or even attend the lesson to be able to play this game.

Why work on finger numbers?

I use letter names with my beginners. It seems to make the note reading process easier a little bit down the road. But I learned that I need to make sure they know the finger numbers too. If group class teachers or workshop teachers use finger numbers my students can be a little lost. As a side note, I learned all my pieces with finger numbers. So I can sing all the songs in Suzuki Books 1 – 4 in finger numbers. For me, that made learning to read music hard. Specifically it was hard to learn positions. So, I probably swing to the other extreme with my students in having them know letters and ID the fingerboard placement by letter. But like so many things in life there are a ditches to get stuck in on either extreme.