Help Your Students Grow With The Music Performance Reflection Guide
The process of music making requires continued personal reflection in order to keep growing. As music teachers, we understand this process and so we work to help our students understand it too. Several years ago I began creating resources for my students…
Help Your Students Practice Effectively With This Practice Tracker and Practice Strategies Guide
Practice. It’s the only path to improving in music and really anything in life. The challenge is learning how to do it well so that we are making progress rather than spinning our wheels. We as teachers spend countless hours helping our…
10 Awesome Winter Concert Pieces for Intermediate – Middle School Orchestra
For many music directors, the winter concert season has come to a close. While concert season may be done for some, it’s good to reflect on selections that went well and were enjoyed by students and audiences alike. In light…
7 Pieces Students Love for Intermediate – Middle School Orchestra
It can be challenging choosing the right music for an ensemble. It’s a balancing act finding music that will suit a developing orchestra – music that will both develop their technique and musicianship as well as capture their interest and…
Celebrating and Fostering Orchestra Leadership Skills
As music educators we are all striving to help our students grow into confident learners. We are trying to sow into them a spirit of discipline, motivation, and build them up to be leaders in our ensembles and in their…
A Quick and Effective Method for Tuning Your Orchestra – Cross Tuning
Time is precious in our classrooms.A common lament among many music educators is that there is never enough time in a period to cover all that we want or need to cover during class.In order to maximize time in our…
Incorporating Finger Patterns In Orchestra
For the past several years I have been incorporating the teaching of finger patterns in my string orchestra. This method of building the fundamentals for playing a string instrument was developed by the string educator, Dr. George Bornoff.Working on finger patterns…
Be A Part Of The Orchestra – Helpful Tips for Recruiting For Your Orchestra
The goal for any music educator at the end of the year is celebrating our students and their many successes. We are also thinking about building our program for the following year and making sure students continue or feed into…
Tips for Learning Key Signatures
Learning key signatures is extremely useful, but can also be challenging for young musicians. We teachers spend a lot of time reviewing, checking in, and assessing students’ knowledge of key signatures. If you are working on learning your key signatures and…
Tips for Effective Classroom Management
Music educators know the importance of classroom management. We often have ensembles and classrooms filled with students. There are a lot of moving parts to running an ensemble and everyone has to work as a team to make the music happen. However,…