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…
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,…
For Teachers: Fostering Student Leadership
Each year we have an award ceremony at my school where we nominate students who have demonstrated leadership qualities. I have to say that every year this award causes me to stop, think, and ask some questions. What does leadership look like? How…
Favorite Christmas and Holiday Collections for Orchestra
I’m sure most school orchestras and music directors are in the midst of preparing music for a winter concert. Undoubtedly, we push and put so much energy and work into that winter performance. Following the performance, we might have a…
Create Online Music Literacy Activities Using PowerPoint Slides
Here is another very simple activity to engage students in the remote setting. This is a follow up to my last post where I discussed creating note identification slides in PowerPoint. Similarly, I have started to create slides with different…
Create Online Note Reading Activities Using Power Point Slides
I was recently inspired by a colleague of mine who was creating interactive Power Point slides to use with her students in the remote teaching setting. The focus was on note value identification. The activity worked like this. Students could…
3 Considerations When Recommending Double Bass Repertoire to Young Bassists
As educators, we know our students best. We know their strengths and weaknesses and we care about their personal and musical growth. Music learning is different for every student and requires us to be tuned into their needs. There have…