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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Here is a performance of Etude No. 16 in Bb major from the 30 Etudes for Double Bass written by Franz Simandl. Who Was Simandl?Simandl was an incredible bassist, teacher, and his influence is far reaching today. His book the New…
It can be challenging to keep warm up time engaging and meaningful to students. We have our routines and procedures for the beginning of class set, but sometimes we need to inject something new to keep our students interest and…
Developing a comfortable stance while playing the bass can take some practice for beginning bass students. Students can run into issues like resting the bass on their shoulder and finding a comfortable position with the bass. In this post, I’ll walk…
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…