-
Group Class – Dinosaur Day
Yesterday was group class Dinosaur Day! I created a theme lesson all about dinosaurs for our Twinklers group class. Dinosaur Day was a great hit! I first thought of this when a friend posted that she found some dinosaur erasers in the “spot” section at Target. She used them with a student. And the dinosaurs fit right on the bow. I thought how fun would that be to have a dinosaur ride on your bow for a whole group class? The more I thought about more and more ideas came to mind. Since dinosaur is 3 syllables, it would be perfect to practice Twinkle Variation D, the triplets! Triplets can…
-
Fingerboard Scales for Beginners
Help your students visualize their fingerboard and know where notes are on their instruments. Here are worksheet fingerboard scales for beginners. Teaching and reviewing where the notes are on the fingerboard is something we do in every lesson. Mary Kay Neal taught in the Suzuki Book 3 teacher training class to have our students say the letters out loud while they are learning to read notes on the staff. As I have incorporated that in my teaching I am discovering how helpful it is to say the letters out loud from the very beginning. Saying it out loud forces the student to associate a letter with the placement of the…
-
Teaching Skips
Steps and skips! Sometimes a visual aide helps students understand skipping and stepping with string crossings. I’ve been drawing this diagram over and over for a couple months now and thought I would create a worksheet. Some exercises in skipping up and down through the scale helps students understand how to skip across strings. Skipping from D to F# can be confusing or hard to grasp when we are skipping from 3rd finger to 1st finger, or skipping from C# to E. Skipping down can even be more confusing. So after students feel comfortable with the A scale and saying the letters up and down the scale, we play a…
