Question of the Week: April 25, 2011: Pros and Cons of Teacher Breaks

As you may already know, last week was spring break week at my studio- YAY! Let's hear it for a week (well...three days at least since I ended up doing two days of make-ups) of no lessons and time to recharge and let my creative juices flow. A week to enjoy other pursuits and enjoy the 'un-teacher' side of my life a bit more.

And I did enjoy it...until I started lessons back up this week and remembered why I really, really have a love-hate relationship with teacher breaks. Here's why: give your studio even one week off and it starts falling apart! Students don't practice and end up coming back having regressed rather than progressed. Books are forgotten, assignments are uncompleted, and I feel like I'm starting over at square 1 with 90% of my studio- UGH!

So here's my question to all of you:

How do you approach scheduled breaks to avoid the negative consequences? Do you have any tips and tricks to help your students actually make progress over a break?

I enjoyed my week off so much- I want to be able to enjoy my well-earned vacations rather than dreading the following week when I have to reap the consequences!

Skittles Board Game with an Easter Twist!

While I totally enjoyed my spring break, I'm slowly getting back into the teaching groove. I wanted to do something fun this week to help my students get back into the swing of lessons after their own spring break from school, so I took Susan Paradis' Skittles board game and modified it using...jelly beans! I know this isn't the most creative, but I had to find some way to use the up the leftover jelly beans without eating them all myself! ;)

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the game, check out this post from Susan's website for more details. Basically, students draw a card with a note name on it (Bass G, Treble F, etc.) and then place a skittle (or jelly bean!) on the correct note on the grand staff gameboard that's also included. A fun and yummy way to review notes!

For my younger students I'm simply adapting the game using a tabletop keyboard. After they draw their card, they place the jelly bean on the correct key.

Have you been playing any fun Easter or spring related games with your own students recently? I'd love to hear about them!

New Worksheets to Help Learn C and Middle C Positions

I had a student this past Friday who is just learning about the C Position in the Primer level of Piano Adventures. She's having a really hard time grasping the concept of using all 10 fingers at once. I assigned fewer pieces for her to work on and instead supplemented with some finger exercises in the C Position to help her get more familiar with the feel, but I also wanted to make some worksheets for her since she and several other students are just starting to experiment with the C Position vs. the Middle C Position.

This seems to be a really tough concept for many of my students to grasp. Even into the first Level of Piano Adventures they will get the two positions confused! I'm hoping these worksheets will help to solidify the differences between the two hand positions.

The first worksheet simply drills recognition of the two hand positions. It's a very simple exercise, but helps the student visualize the spatial difference between the two hand positions.

The second worksheet is a bit more involved and requires a good knowledge of finger numbers. Given a keyboard picture with one finger for each hand filled in, the student has to fill in the remaining fingers and then identify the hand position.

I haven't tried either of these out yet...but I'll definitely be using them in the coming week! Please send feedback- positive or negative- my way :)

Also...for those of you who often visit the printable section of my blog- how am I doing on organization? Do you find it easy to navigate and select the worksheet you want? Is there anything I can do to make things better organized?

What Was I So Worried About?!

Yesterday evening was our church's Maundy Thursday service. It's a beautiful evening of music and reflection, and our worship director usually pulls in other musicians to help add to the event. So I wasn't surprised when she approached me last Sunday and handed me some music to look at for the flute choir for Thursday. When I looked at it, however, I was a bit surprised at the level of difficulty and the intricacies...were we really going to pull this off on the fly for Thursday?!

She asked me to come early on Thursday evening to rehearse with the flute choir, which I agreed to do, but I left church feeling a little nervous about getting my accompaniment together before then.

The following days saw me spending a considerable amount of time working on the piece. Every spare minute found me at the piano. I meticulously copied the music, cut out the piano line and pasted it together onto 4 pages so I'd have less page turns. I worked with the metronome, gradually increasing my speed so I was certain I'd be able to keep up with the quartet. And while I wasn't worried about any other aspect of the service, I was pretty anxious about pulling this piece off!

...Until I arrived at church last night and realized that we weren't playing the piece for the service! In fact, we might not be playing it at all! Basically, Linda had given me the music because this was a piece that the flute choir was considering. Before they made their decision, however, they wanted to run through it once with an accompanist to see how that changed the nature of the piece...I was just an experimental add-on ;) When we did our trial run, I was also surprised (and a bit relieved!) to note that the choir was taking a much slower tempo than the one suggested.

Moral of the story?: I had basically gotten myself all worked up about nothing!

I could cite countless examples like this in my past experience as a musician when I'll get roped into something and literally feel like I'm pulling my hair out to try and get it together, only to realize that I was taking the whole endeavor way too seriously! I just have to laugh at myself and try to remind myself not to take things so seriously in the future.

Can you relate? Do you have any stories to tell about times when you as a musician found yourself 'overly prepared' and guilty of taking a situation way too seriously?! I'd love to hear about it.

Enjoying My Spring Break

It's Wednesday and I haven't posted so far this week because...(drum roll!) I'm on Spring Break! While this might not seem huge to any of you, for me it is. I never used to take off at all over my spring term, but just pushed right through to the recital. After several years this started to mean major burn out by the time May rolled around.

So this year for the first time I decided to take a little 'me' time in the form of a week-long spring break! I'm still involved with multiple Holy Week church activities and services and I have a few make-up lessons thrown in here and there, but overall this week is lesson-free and I'm guilty of completely loving it!

I thought about my lack of posting this morning and felt momentarily guilty, but not guilty enough to post anything more than a little explanation. I'm determined to really, truly enjoy this week off!

I'll be back to more regular posting next week. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on spring break! Do you routinely take a week off sometime in the spring? If so, have you found it restful, or do you find yourself doing more planning than anything else?! If you'd don't take off, how do you manage to survive until the end of the term?

FACE Flashcards for Treble and Bass Clef

As a relatively new piano teacher, I'm constantly in the process of developing new resources for personal use in my studio (I can't wait to see where I am 5 or so years from now- I'll have flashcards and worksheets galore! :) ).

This morning (Saturday) my hubby got called into work. I wasn't planning on doing any studio work...but I'd been itching to complete these flashcards so I started some laundry, made a cup of coffee...and voila! The flashcards are complete!

I don't know how many teachers use FACE in the bass clef to help students remember notes, but I've created a set of FACE flashcards for both bass and treble clef. This is a spin-off of a concept used by my mentor when I was student teaching. Basically, each card contains three notes from a FACE group...the goal of the student is to identify the notes as quickly as possible.

The possibilities are many and varied. You can use these cards away from the piano and have the student(s) call out the note names, you can incorporate this into an individual lesson as an activity at the keyboard by having them play the notes, you can mix and match both sets and play a matching game (if I made these cards correctly the treble and bass sets should be identical as far as note patterns go), you can use a tabletop or floor keyboard and have students place tokens on the correct keys...as I said- many and varied! And I'm sure there are many more ways they can be used as well!

I'd love to hear of any other creative ways you can think of to use these cards! They're available for download under the printables tab. Each set consists of 3 sheets- the third sheet is a template for flashcard backs- completely up to you whether you want them to have backs or not- it always helps me when I'm looking for a specific flashcard set in a hurry!

Surprise Composition Activity

Ever since group lessons last month, one of my Friday evening students has asked without fail at her lesson, "Are we going to play a game this week?" So I decided to cook up a little surprise for her this evening (don't tell on me and let her know that this kinda wasn't a game- she LOVED it ;) ).

She has just started learning about the staff, and I decided it would be fun to do a little composition activity! I pulled out one of my handy laminated worksheets and we used the back to make our grand staff (I did the staff lines but she did everything else).

Then we talked about what notes we wanted to add and what rhythms. She hasn't yet learned about time signatures, only knows 3 notes, and I didn't want to take a huge amount of time on this activity, so we just picked 6 notes and didn't worry about bar lines and measures.

Then we chose a title for the piece. As you can see, her mind was on sports with spring in the air! After we had our piece all completed she got to play it on the piano. She was so excited about this activity and called her mom and little brother into the room at the end of the lesson to play her composition for them.

Just a little fun away from the piano on a Friday afternoon! Have you had any teaching inspirations yesterday for your students?