Teaching orchestra

After seeing a fingering poster online that another orchestra teacher had created, I knew I wanted to make a set for myself. I cut strips of black paper at various widths to show the strings from thickest to thinnest (1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1"), laminated the poster, then used Velcro to mark where each note would go. Each letter name bubble was cut out, laminated, and Velcro-ed. I also taped a plastic baggie to the back of the poster to store the unused notes. At one school, I have a strip of…

Wanna be a cool orchestra teacher? Try this idea with your beginners! I've been listening to the song 'Keep Your Head Up' and I love it! Perfect for bow exercises...but it got me thinking... If I could change the words a little - especially in the chorus - it would be perfect to use to teach proper instrument position. So I changed the words to the song: I plan on having my orchestra learn the words (at least to the chorus) and sing them while we are setting our left hand positions. I…

From time to time, we have checkup days in small groups, where each student plays for me individually and then I can give some one-on-one feedback to each student. I prefer to emphasize the value of the individualized feedback, talking about what's going well and where there is room for improvement, rather than calling it a playing test and emphasizing the grade part of it. I do enter grades from these checkups, but I don't think that's as useful to students as the one-on-one mini-lesson…

A few days ago a received a letter from a reader: I teach 4th and 5th grade beginning strings and orchestra. I absolutely love you...

I show my classes a 'video of the week' every Monday with some sort of message that I want students to internalize during the week. Someti...

It's finally finished - my book for teaching shifting in string orchestra! I started working on this last year because I HATED teachin...

It has been difficult for me to find music for teaching shifting. When learning how to play in position, students need music that is somewhat simple so they can focus on developing the muscle memory for solid intonation. I believe many tunes in method books which emphasize shifting are too difficult - requiring the student to think about too many skills at once (bowing, shifting up, then down, then up, fingering, note reading, rhythm). I still remember when my private teacher told me that I…

I really try to be organized and have looked for the perfect teacher planner to help me keep track of everything. I've never been able to find anything that works perfectly for a middle school orchestra teacher, so I created some printable templates to make my own teacher planner binder. This is way less expensive than buying a pre-made planner full of un-needed or non-applicable pages. Check it out and for a limited time you may download for free HERE! 8 pages total - includes a lesson plan…

After a year full of rehearsal and practice some of my school instruments look a little thrashed. Most of my school cellos are shared by 3 students - so they get a lot of use in a day. (Someday I hope to have enough cellos for all my students, but right now I’m about 40 short.) After our final concert I do an instrument cleaning day and get everything looking shiny. It’s good for general maintenance to have all students clean their instruments at least once per year. We use spray bottles…

This idea isn't totally new..I've heard of teachers using a variety of tubular objects for students to practice straight bowing...such as to...