With back to school time approaching, I thought I would share a tip that really helped me to get organized last year!
If you have read some of my other blog posts, you know that I enjoy incorporating different elements of musicianship into my students’ lessons. Ear training, transposing, improvising and composing—these are all skills that I want my students to learn.
However, most of my students take thirty minute lessons, and every minute is precious! It can be difficult to cover our core lesson activities (repertoire, technique, theory) and have time left over. Last year, I came up with a way to keep myself organized and help me incorporate more musicianship activities into my lessons: the musicianship binder.
My binder has tabs for ear training, composing, and transposing. I also keep it stocked with staff paper. I put worksheets that I create for my students in the binder, and anytime I come across an idea that I want to use with my students, I print it out and put it in my binder too.
Since everything is printed out and in one place, it is easy to grab an activity for a student. I try to rotate through activities so that we do something different at each lesson. It is also fun to plan ahead and put together a few activities around a common theme. Right now I am putting together activities centered around fall, Halloween and Christmas.
What do you think? How do you organize the extra activities you use with your students?
If you have read some of my other blog posts, you know that I enjoy incorporating different elements of musicianship into my students’ lessons. Ear training, transposing, improvising and composing—these are all skills that I want my students to learn.
However, most of my students take thirty minute lessons, and every minute is precious! It can be difficult to cover our core lesson activities (repertoire, technique, theory) and have time left over. Last year, I came up with a way to keep myself organized and help me incorporate more musicianship activities into my lessons: the musicianship binder.
My binder has tabs for ear training, composing, and transposing. I also keep it stocked with staff paper. I put worksheets that I create for my students in the binder, and anytime I come across an idea that I want to use with my students, I print it out and put it in my binder too.
Since everything is printed out and in one place, it is easy to grab an activity for a student. I try to rotate through activities so that we do something different at each lesson. It is also fun to plan ahead and put together a few activities around a common theme. Right now I am putting together activities centered around fall, Halloween and Christmas.
What do you think? How do you organize the extra activities you use with your students?
RSS Feed
