Iluviola’s Weblog

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.)

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