I recently had a party where I used balloons as decorations. As I was taking the balloons down, I thought “I know there’s  a way I can use these with my piano students.” I had a group lesson coming up and I knew there was a game I could play with them.  So I started drawing one note or rest on each balloon and put them all together on the floor.

When my piano students walked in to their group lesson and saw all of the different colored balloons on the floor, they instantly got excited and started asking what we we would be doing with them.  They also started hitting the balloons around to each other. Who could resist?!  The balloons brought instant energy and excitement to the group lesson!

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Here’s how to play Balloon Relay:

Blow up balloons and write one note/rest on each balloon.  I used around 15 balloons and used eighth, quarter, half, and dotted half notes/rests.

Divide teams into two groups.  Call out a number at the beginning of each round. The number represents the number of beats your teams will be collecting.  (8 beats, 5, 6, 4, 9, 3, etc.)  Teams gather balloons until they reached the correct number of beats.  Players may only collect ONE balloon at a time.

Start with player 1 from each team.  Once you say “Go!”, players will run to the pile of balloons and collect just ONE.  They will run back to their group and then player 2 will run to collect one balloon.  Continue in this manner until the teams tell you they are finished.  Double check that they have the correct number of beats.  If they are correct, they win the round.  If not, the other team gets a chance.  Continue in this manner until one team reaches 5 points (or any number you set).

Try another version of Balloon Relay by writing one note name on each balloon and call out different chords or scales for your students to spell.

Get creative with different adaptations of this game and share how you use this in your studio!