Preparing for the Recital

My Spring Recital is a mere 2 1/2 weeks away and there is much to do before then.  This recital is really a practice session for the Piano Guild Auditions my students will participate in just a couple of days later.  The Piano Guild is a professional organization for piano teachers and one of the main projects of the organization is the yearly auditions.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of cities all over the world will host  adjudicators who will evaluate each student's playing.  This is not an audition in the typical sense - there are no scholarships or major awards to be won.  These are auditions that encourage students to prepare well and play a polished program of music and the students only compete against themselves.  The auditions are also good for the teachers, because the teachers will also be evaluated (are the students prepared well , does the music performed match up with the student's level, do the students know their scales and cadences, etc.).  I've been teaching piano for over 18 years and this is the first year I've been able to join the Guild.  For the first 15 years, I traveled so much with my career Army husband that it just didn't make sense to join - I moved every 12- 24 months and was never able to maintain a roster of students long enough to be involved in this.  Then for a few years,  I was simply too poor to spend extra money on professional organizations.  Finally, this past year, life has settled down, I will be in my current city for the foreseeable future, and my income has leveled out, so organizations like The Guild are now feasible for me to belong to.

Generally, my recitals are very relaxed.  I believe that the purpose of a recital is to prepare students for "real world playing", so recitals should be a place where students feel love and encouragement, a place where they can develop the confidence to go into the world and play for their school choir, church, community theatre or perhaps, one day play in a Broadway orchestra or for Carnegie Hall! For some recitals I allow the nervous students to play with their music in front of them.  However, for this recital, all music must be memorized.  Every student will perform 4 pieces of music plus scales and cadences (first year students are not required to play scales, although at least 2 of my first year students will).  Overall, I feel good about how my students will perform.

Opportunities like the Guild Auditions, recitals, solo and ensemble competitions and other low-key performance opportunities are so good for piano students.  Unlike band or orchestra students, there are few opportunities for piano students to play in front of an audience.  I have been thinking for several years about how to create more performance opportunities for piano students.  Piano ensembles are hard to create simply because pianos are not easy to lug around from one venue to the next!  School bands and orchestras rarely create a place for budding pianists to perform and accompanying a school choir can be an overwhelming task for most middle school or high school students.  So, what can we do?  There has to be a way to involve piano students in ensemble playing more frequently.  If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.  Perhaps we can join forces and create performance opportunities for our student pianists!

Dancing With The Preschoolers

This week's music classes focuses on movement.  Sometimes, you have to go into a classroom with the idea of just having fun - and that is what we are doing this week!  Now, just because we are having fun does not mean that the children are not learning.  But this week's learning is the best kind of all - the kind that sneaks up on you and happens when you least expect it.  Oh yes, the kids are having fun this week, but they are also learning some valuable lessons:  keeping a steady beat, following directions, exercising their bodies and thinking creatively.  Want a peek into a portion of one of my classes this week?  Here's a bit of what we did:

1.  We sang 'Good Morning' to each other, using Sue Schnitzer's song, "Good Morning".  We bowed to each other, stretched up high, touched our toes, waved Hello, listened to the music (and identified the instruments that were playing) oh, and we twirled around.

2.  We went to Kentucky.  Using another Sue Schnitzer recording, Going to Kentucky, we shook it high, shook it low and turned around and around and around and around until it was time to STOP!  We used our bodies for the movements in this song, but this is a great song to use with egg shakers or tambourines and shake, shake, shake!

3.  We pretended to be bunnies sleeping and then hopped, jumped and skipped together.  Using the song Hop Little Bunnies, which can be sung A Capella, let the words guide you and the children in creating movements to accompany this very simple song.

4.  We were another sleeping animals:  bears.  The children pretend to sleep while you softly sing Grizzly Bear.  Please be very quiet.  Please be very quiet.  If you wake him, if you shake him, he'll get very MAD!  You can gently tickle a couple of sleeping bears when you sing 'MAD' and listen to the little bears get very giggly.

Of course, classes this week will include rhythmic recognition and echoing back rhythms, but for the most part, we will dance, pretend and simply enjoy each other's company in music class this week.

Easter Egg Surprise

Want to help your preschoolers develop better listening skills?  Here is a fun and easy activity to help with listening and reasoning skills:

You will need:

6 plastic Easter eggs
6 different items to place inside the eggs (you will need TWO of each item).  Some items you might choose are a penny, a cotton ball, a jingle bell, a broken crayon, a rubber ball, etc.

What to do:

fill each Easter egg with one item
save the duplicate item for demonstration purposes

Just a reminder to maintain control of the small objects - some of them may be choking hazards!

Show the preschoolers each item and tell them that one of these items is inside each egg.  Shake each egg one at a time, just so that the children can hear the different sounds.  Shake one of the eggs and let the kids guess what's inside the egg.  No matter what the children say, take the duplicate item and place it in front of the
egg.Repeat this for each egg.  When all the items have been guessed, open each egg and let the children see if they guessed correctly.

Preschoolers love this activity.  They will get very excited as you are opening up the eggs and if they are correct will rejoice very loudly!  If you have time, you can even let the children look around the room to find objects to place inside the eggs.  Doing this allows you the opportunity to also talk about spacial perceptions, because you may have a child or two who chooses an object that is too big to fit inside the egg.  When you are finished with this activity, have an egg hunt with the empty eggs (or fill them with stickers or other small prizes).

Happy Easter Everyone!!

Laments of an Orchestra Mom

My youngest daughter is a cellist.  She has been playing for 3 1/2  years and has become quite good (if I do say so myself!).  She plays with her school orchestra, a local youth orchestra and has been in the All-County Orchestra for 4 seasons (1st chair last year, baby!). In case you are wondering, she started playing cello in the fall of the 5th grade, All-County is in the fall of the year, so she had only been playing for a couple of months when she was selected for the honor - that's how we get 4 All-County Orchestras in 3 1/2 years!  Anyway, I digress with a bit of bragging here!

Last month was my daughter's Spring Concert at school.  It is not a big school orchestra; there are 6th, 7th and 8th grade orchestras, with a combined enrollment of maybe 75 students, 25 instruments or so in each orchestra. Even so, with apx. 75 students performing, you would expect to have an audience of around 100 people (parent's, grandparents, siblings, etc) at the concert.  When I walked into the gym for the performance, my heart sank;  there were maybe 40 people there to listen to the concert.  40 people to encourage these budding musicians.  40 people to applaud a semester's worth of hard work.  40 people.  Where in the world were the parents?  I understand that some of them may have to work in the evenings (I arrived with just a few minutes to spare because of my work schedule).  But only 40 people?  That means when you count families that brought 3 or 4 people with them, there were only about 20 or 25 families represented at the concert.  20 or 25 families there made the effort to be there for their children.

I am saddened by the turn out for this concert.  Playing an instrument requires discipline, dedication and self-sacrifice.  Learning to play as an ensemble requires cooperation and command of the instrument.  Parents should be encouraging their children to pursue the study of music.  Parents should be at every concert, recital, and competition.  Parents - if you wouldn't miss your child's soccer or softball game, why would you miss an orchestra concert?

I will confess, that I have no real point in this posting, except to lament a little bit.  I wish that all of our school orchestras would have supportive parents who were proud of their child's efforts.  I wish that school orchestra directors could know that all the parents appreciate their dedication.  I wish that all of our children who wanted to learn to play an instrument were blessed with parents who would do anything to make that happen for them.  I can only wish.

Dinosaur Songs For the Preschooler

Lately my students have been asking for dinosaur songs.  I don't know why, but they have.  I have a dinosaur unit that I use once (sometimes twice) a year, so I will be pulling those songs out this month.  My dinosaur unit is based mostly on having fun and encouraging the preschoolers to sing and move.  There is a chant that I use with my dinosaur unit.  I have tried to find the author of the chant to no avail.  (If you know who wrote this, please let me know!)

Five hungry dinosaurs wading through a swamp
The first one says, "I like to stomp"
The second one says, "My tummy is growling"
The third one says, "I like to go prowling"
The fourth one says, " Let's look for some food"
The fifth one says, "I'm in a bad mood"
Five hungry dinosaurs wading through a swamp
They are very hungry, chomp, chomp, chomp


Chants, like this one, are very good for teaching preschoolers the concept of steady beat.  You can clap the beat or use rhythm sticks to tap the beat on the floor.  When I use this chant, I use visual aids to help the children remember the order of the chant.  I simply laminated dinosaur clip art that illustrated each of the five dinosaurs.  You can use the visual aids to initiate a conversation before the chant is introduced.   The fifth dinosaur (the one in a bad mood) is especially helpful for talking about feelings.  You can also use this chant to help improve vocabulary.  The words 'prowling' and 'swamp' may be new to preschoolers, so after you introduce the chant, spend a couple of minutes talking to them about what these words mean.

Of course, I do have some songs that I use in my dinosaur unit.  Here are the songs that I use.  (If you have other great dinosaur songs, please let me know!):

Dinosaur Stomp by Jack Hartmann
Iguanodon by Tessarose
Five Big Dinosaurs by Jack Hartmann
Walk the Dinosaur by Was (Was Not)
Those Dinosaur Blues by Sandra Boynton
Dinosaur, Dinosaur (With Jump Rope Jive) by Sandra Boynton