Teaching orchestra

I like to call Friday rehearsals 'Friday Fun Day!' I want Fridays to be a celebration of all we learned during the week, but also serve as a meaningful review and reinforcement of material. Last week one of my students said, 'It's funny you call Fridays 'Friday fun day' because every day is fun!' Learning an instrument is fun...that means the pressure is off! No need to spend hours and hours planning intricate games. I've found my favorite Friday Fun Day is a review day using Ninja Belts as…

Oh happy day! This week I taught my beginners how to tune and I wish I would have done it months ago. They were excited to learn how to tune. Students want to be able to tune their instruments because it's not fun practicing when your instrument is way out of tune. Sometimes we assume that students can not tune their instruments and we don't want to risk it because strings are expensive. I usually don't have my students tune themselves until their 2nd year, but I teach how to tune at the end…

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...

Are you looking for a super fun game you can play with your orchestra students that won't take much time to prepare? Try BATTLESHIP! This game works great to review any type of music students have been learning. It's very simple to play and students love it! Here's how to play... 1. Choose your music. I chose one of our concert pieces, but you can use exercises from method books or anything you like. 2. Project your gameboard on screen. I quickly made a gameboard using JAMBOARD. You can use…

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…

These help my students get better, FAST!

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...

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…

This is my 12th year teaching orchestra, and I'm still learning and discovering more efficient ways to teach students and take care of daily teaching duties. Here are a few of my discoveries from the first couple weeks of school...wish I would have known this stuff earlier! 1. Putting tapes on instruments. I've posted before about the kind of tapes I use...car pinstripe tape: It takes a lot of time to put tapes on instruments. Some years I have let my more advanced students put tapes on the…

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…