I am a new teacher and have a 5 year old student....hes natrually a littl hyper. He does though enjoy his lessons and sits in attention...but i have doubts hes learning what the notes are....like if i show him middle C note, he doesnt know what it looks like so he guesses....
I want to appeal to him by playing music games...i made a flash card game..where he matches the note with the letter...but i would like other games i could wirte out or print....i would apprecoate i you guys could give ideas or web sites that have fre printable games...

Thanks so much for your help

I don't know of any websites with free games but I can tell you that 5 year olds take quite a while to be able to identify notes on the stave. Also there is no way they will get it if they only look at them once a week in their lesson. You need to make sure their parents will sit with them every day and go through it carefully. Some 5 year olds are still not great with their alphabet and hardly any of them can say backward GFEDCBA, something which we do in music all the time. Some concepts which you take for granted like the fact that the notes on the stave move alphabetically from line-space-line will not be clear to a 5 year old right away. The danger is that we make too many assumptions about what they know. I teach the whole great stave right from the start rather than just certain notes. With some I will use the rhymes (All Cows Eat Grass etc.) and with younger ones I use colours based on the Tobin music system.

I have been teaching my son using a common method sometimes seen with little toy guitars or toy musical instruments...
Numbers on the keys and on the sheet music..
The letter names can be used the same.

Creating my own sheets in photoshop, if you like I can send you a few..

Its helpful for him to recognize the numbers to the keys, the remembering how to read the notes will come in a few years I am sure..

Wannasteinway,

Why don't you check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EbQDrLwkxo

It's with my friend, Julie, who uses a lot of games and group activities with older kids, but I bet you can adapt them to your 5-year old in private lessons as well.

Among the activities you'll see in the video:
1. Warmups - good physical activities for students to gain awareness of their bodies' capabilities
2. Rhythm tapping at the table - builds up listening skills and rhythm. Also an opportunity to work on the bridge in the hand.
3. Tempo cards - put them in order, and then let the kid(s) walk/run in the tempo that you tell them to.
4. Tempo guessing - You can play a piece at a certain tempo and see if he can guess it, or vice versa.
5. Rhythm cards - Make a bunch of rhythm cards and let him put it in any order and then chant or tap them out. In the video, Julie uses 16th note rhythms, but you could just start with quarter notes, half notes, and rests with your 5 year old.
6. Flash card hiding game - You can take those flash cards you have and hide them and let him go find one at a time and bring it to the piano and play it as fast as he can. This is particularly effective for the 'hyper' kids.
7. Improvisation - You can still let your kid improvise like on black keys or other limited key range.

Let us know if you use any of these and how well they work!