5 Things I’m Loving This Week (My Favorite Violin Teaching Resources) — April 8, 2016

This post was originally published on the Plucky Violin Teacher Blog on April 8, 2016 so links and resources may not be current.

Happy Friday, everyone!  I am so excited for tomorrow.  My students are performing in our very first “Review Recital.”  Everyone has picked their favorite review piece to play, one that they could polish and get ready in only a couple weeks.  They are all very prepared and excited about playing old favorites.  I highly recommend having a review recital in your studio, it’s been so much fun getting ready for ours!

My Five Favorite Violin Teaching Resources This Week…

1. Learning key signatures can be such a struggle for many students, but don’t worry!  This post on Practice Makes It Easy has got you covered with strategies for different learning styles.  Do you have your students memorize key signatures?

2. I enjoyed this post on Red Desert Violin about listening.  Here’s how it begins, “Two main things separate truly professional musicians from dabblers: the way they listen and the way they practice.”  Do our students listen like “dabblers?”

3. If you’ve been reading these posts for a while, then you already know what a podcast junkie I am.  I listen to a LOT of podcasts, I listen in the car, when I am cleaning, when I am getting ready for the day…I have podcasts playing almost all day.  I love to learn and listen to audiobooks, so podcasts are perfect for me!  I was so excited to see the Paula Bird has launched a new podcast on iTunes all about the Suzuki method!  Check it out and subscribe here!

4. When I need a little pick-me-up, Valse-Scherzo Op. 34 by Tchaikovsky will do just the trick!  It’s a delightful piece.  This video of Vadim Repin is a great one to show students to model curved fingers on the left hand staying close to the fingerboard.  It’s also just fantastic violin playing!

5. The last thing I’m loving this week is the Plucky Violin Teacher Book Club.  It’s given me the motivation to do a lot of reading and learning about teaching and business.  I was skeptical about March’s book (How Children Learn by John Holt), I wasn’t as excited about that one as I was about some of the others.  But, wow.  It was amazing.  I loved it.  I think the concepts I learned from the book will change the way I teach, I’m going to strive for a better balance of “deliberate instruction” and exploration.  I wrote a blog post about the book, you can read it here.