Emma~ FLASHCARD EXTRAVAGANZA
Today I gave Emma an hour long lesson. This was probably one of the more frustrating lessons I’ve given her, but I take the blame as my tired state disallowed me to stay on task. Regardless, I think that by the end of the lesson I actually got her excited about practicing this weekend.
We went through her gold sheet from the string project stations. I was upset but not too surprised that she didn’t have the highest scores on the majority of the tasks. I asked her if she had practiced what the teacher suggested for each task and she said that she didn’t have the time to practice at all this week! I, with my wit still in tact despite my drowsiness, responded with telling her that I don’t have time to practice either but I always somehow get in 2 hours a day!
I really wanted to focus on just a few things during the lesson so that she could concentrate on those few things during the next couple of days before Monday’s class. I went over flashcards with her (making her sit down, otherwise she would LITERALLY dance around the room while I was trying to get her to say the note names) starting with just saying what the note name is, then playing and saying. Near the end of the flashcard time (only about 5 minutes or so) I started counting down and then changing after I counted from 3 to 1, which obviously frustrated her, but she started to actually get the notes quicker, before I even got to 1.
I told her that I wanted her to study her flashcards really hard this weekend and have her mom or dad practice changing the flashcards after 3 seconds. After flashcards we went immediately to composition reading. The flashcards helped with her getting the note names but she still had trouble with playing through the song without stopping. I made her play the hard parts at least 4 times and then the whole song. This helped a lot!
She asked me why I kept making her play things over and over. I told her why AFTER she did it. I explained to her that before she repeated it she was having a hard time getting through the song, but the fourth time she played it it was almost perfect! She noticed this too. I told her that this is how she should practice.
We went over a lot of other things on the sheet, but my main focus for her this weekend was note names with flash cards and composition assignments.
I told her that today she only played like an okay violist, but I know that Emma is a great violist and that the great violist would come out if she practiced really hard. I gave her a challenge: She had to get a 3 on her flashcards and 3’s all the way down in the student composition assignment. I said, if she got any 1’s I would be very upset, and 2’s would be okay, but if she got all 3’s I would be so proud of her and maybe even get her any piece of candy she wants the next week.
Here’s a funny thing: I ask all of my students after their lessons if they’re “doing anything fun this weekend” or “what are you doing this weekend?” And when I asked Emma she said, “Practicing my flashcards and my composition assignments really hard.” I didn’t realize I had drilled that into her head THAT much during the lesson.
Anywho, I really hope she get’s 3’s on those things, at the very least. I’m excited to see how many people show up to Monday’s Dolce class, hopefully more than 4 
hehe
Rita~3/18/08
I had a lesson with Rita last night for 30 minutes. We began with the G-major scale. I had her learn it this week with knowing just the fingers for the D-major scale and starting on the open G instead of D. I wrote out the notes on staff paper and did a little bit of point-and-say (i point to a note she has to say it and play it, like flashcards, but less work for me i guess ). She has the G string notes down pretty good, but I think I’m going to go over them again next week just to make sure. I am very impressed with how well she is doing with down-wiggle-up-wiggle. Her bow is so straight, she stays right within the stickers on her bow and the sound is so clean. When we started on the G it was a little scratchy, but I told her I wanted a cleaner sound and she figured out to use more index finger to pull the sound out cleaner from the G as opposed to the D or the A.
Then we went on into the book and i asked her to pick the two toughest things from the assignment sheet for this week. We went through a couple of songs and isolated parts that gave her trouble. The thing with Rita is, she doesn’t practice. But you just go through things with her once or twice and she has it pretty much perfect! (notewise anyway) I wish she practiced more, and I give her a challenge to practice at least 15 minutes for 3 days, then the next week for 4 days, then the next week for 20 minutes a day, trying to increase the challenge, but I can’t seem to get her to practice. Maybe incentives would work? Should I make my own practice sheet for her aside from the one given in class?
As for her helicopter fingers, they are amazing! I can tell she is concentrating on it every time and she is doing so well. Now i just want her fingers to be there when she starts playing and not after she’s begun. He wrist collapses every once in a while and i have to remind her to keep it straight, but it is a seldom occurance…usually only when she is trying to concentrate on something else.
Also, her fingers have been getting very sharp. so i told her that before she starts playing anything EVER that she had to check where her thumb was on the neck of the instrument and make sure her fingers are hovering over the finger board, and over the right tapes. Hopefully these things will help.
I tried to encourage her to practice more by telling her about her potential as a violist. She does so well in private lessons and she’s definitely one of the quickest students and more advanced students we have in the Monday class. I told her that if we were able to get through everything really quickly in our lessons we could even start learning music outside of the EE books. We’ll see how this effects her preparation for next weeks lesson. I hope it works (*crosses fingers*)
Emma~ Left Hand
I gave Emma a lesson for an hour on Monday. I planned on just going through the practice sheet with her so we started with a scale. I actually had her doing the G-major scale and focused on her bowing the Down Wiggle Up Wiggle. She was doing pretty well, I just needed to have her go through it a couple of times focusing on her quarter notes being shorter. We went through Ferre Jacques and I had to keep reminding her to start slow so she could get the ABAGF#D without slowing the tempo. She knows the song very well so I was able to play through it as a round with her a few times. She seems to get frustrated when I make her do things multiple times but she still does them. Then we tried going through some of the pieces in Essential Elements and I tried to have her say the notes of each measure and she kept asking me if it was right so I decided it was time for FLASH CARDS!!! woo hoo!
We spent a good 10 minutes on flashcards since we had an hour. She was squirming so it took longer than it should have, but I decided after she was stalling the process by doing so that I would speed it up. She started recalling them better and quicker. We did two speed rounds at the end of the ‘flashcard session’ and she got them all and played them all perfectly. I plan on going through flashcards at our next lesson and seeing where she’s at with that. I have a feeling we may have to do flashcards at the beginning of each lesson for a few more weeks.
When we started playing twinkle I was really noticing how her left hand kept creeping up the finger board which, in turn, made her intonation suffer. I put a sticker for where her thumb should stay so that her hand wouldn’t slip. I’ll see how helpful that was when we have our next lesson.
Then I noticed that she was shaking her hand out after playing each song in EE (along with her wrist constantly collapsing!). I decided to steal some technique from Karen Richter’s masterclass from viola day last year! I had her put the neck of the instrument in between her index and middle finger and place her second finger and third finger on the correct tapes, leaving out the first tape. She and I played open, 2, 3, 2, open over and over again together and while she was playing I would stop and check to see how her wrist was doing and staring at it which made her adjust. This exercise helped a LOT with loosening her death grip on the neck and with keeping her wrist relaxed and somewhat straight and natural looking. I made her look in the mirror so she could see what her wrist should look like.
At the end of the lesson I had her do a couple of songs that she knew she could do well out of EE. I like doing this so that the student leaves the lesson feeling like they have something to work on but that they also have a couple of things that they can show me that they’re proud of.
Emma and I keep a notebook for what she’s supposed to do. I’m not sure if she looks at it. I didn’t think to tell her mom to make sure she was looking at it, but I will do that at our next lesson.
Rita~ Right Hand
I gave Rita a lesson on Tuesday evening. She is in the Monday Dolce class. This week went very well. Last week Kate observed me teaching her and we worked on keeping her fingers close to the finger board. This week we had the same issue and she really started getting it. I had her do a D major scale (the only one she knows right now) and I noticed as she went down the scale, going from open A to third finger G she was taking all of her fingers completely away from the finger board and then having to whip them all the way back and find where to put them to get the G which, obviously, created quite a pause between notes. i showed her my fingers and how i had them hovering over the finger board (she was so smart, she even told me that I didn’t put all my fingers down! obviously I redid the example hehe). This demonstration seemed to help her with what it would look like for her. While she played down the scale again, I put my hand right next to hers like a wall so she couldn’t move them very far from the finger board. I had her go back and forth slowly between open A and third finger G and sped up until she really had it. This week she is supposed to work on keeping her fingers close to the finger board and learning the new songs.
(She is really fast at learning songs…we isolated measures that gave her trouble and got through them. I think I’m going to bring flash cards to next weeks lesson to help with note identification. Most of the time she isn’t guessing, but she could identify them faster, I’m sure.)
ttfn
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