5 Things I’m Loving This Week: Violin Teaching Ideas May 6, 2016

This post was originally published on the Plucky Violin Teacher blog on May 6, 2016, so links and resources may not be current.

Here’s this week’s round-up of violin teaching ideas!

1. If you want to build and strengthen your studio community, then this tip from composecreate.com is just for you!  Having the students write down a compliment for all the students in the recital would be a great way to encourage active listening, and boost morale!

2. My students often get bored with their review pieces.  Sometimes you gotta just change things up!  This is a great tip for adding some fun to practicing review pieces.  Check out Twinkle in the Garage here…

3.  This practice challenge idea is perfect for spring and it is so creative.  I guess it’s also a like a little science experiment too.  Win-win!  Can your students beat the bean?

4.  I was so inspired by this post from Teach Piano Today that I adapted their idea and created a Mother’s Day Composition Activity for my violin students.  If you’ve wanted to start doing some composition with your violin students this might be a good place to start.  The activity is best for beginning to intermediate readers, but if your student is not reading yet, you could do the activity on the first page with them and make an audio recording for their mom.  You can read my post about it here and download the printable activity.

5.  This video is pretty old, but it is so great.  It’s a funny one to share with your students.  Igudesman and Joo have so many great classical music-comedy videos, but this one is one of my favorites.  It won’t be quite as hilarious if they don’t know the song, “I Will Survive,” but it’s still pretty funny because of how ridiculous these guys are.

What are your favorite blog posts or online resources for violin teaching ideas? Please share in the comments!