Keepviolinin

I’ve started individual customized lesson plans for my students and it has helped me become even more organized:) I was going to have a master lesson plan, but I noticed as I started teaching, each and every student is different.  Some students learn really fast and can grasp the concept very quickly, while other students(most of the time younger ones) may need me to find all sorts of ways to help him/her with one specific technique.  Writing out a lesson plan for each of them really has helped me think about how I can improve my teaching and help me become more efficient during my class time.

Austin just started working on Variation B from the twinkles, and we’ve been working mostly on the use of his pinky on the bow hand.  I liked how when I was in the Suzuki Book I training, Dr. Baer told us about the ‘roles’ of our fingers and she called our index finger ‘the boss’.  However, in violin playing, it can’t be ‘the boss’ because we don’t want our hand to become pronated but rather more balanced. Austin loved hearing about the names of each finger and its role in holding the bow correctly.  I was never taught this way when I was young, and I just find these names so helpful with teaching kids and it really has helped him understand what exactly I wanted him to do.