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 game away from the instrument using an m’n’m or game piece to skip and step on the A scale stairs. Then we move to the instrument skipping and stepping on the instrument. Looking at the stair-steps while playing helps to start to navigate skipping on the instruments. Here’s the same chart for D Major that works well for Allegretto and Andantino in Book 1. Enjoy stepping and skipping!
A Major
D Major