I’m working on two things for the spring.  I’ve procrastinated and now have about 24 hours to complete these before the madness returns! go! go! go!

One is a curriculum for first and second year orchestra students, with an analogous one for my private cello and bass students.   The other is a shor Basic Skills Packet for orchestra students.  Because music performance and orchestra (the subjects I teach) are incredibly broad, particularly when taken together, I think a curriculum of sorts will be really helpful.  By creating ‘standards’, I’ll be able to assess the progress of individual students and more accurately identify areas that need work.  It will also help elucidate my own successes as a teacher, which is important since I tend to for whatever reason focus more on my areas of perceived failure.

As an added bonus having a curriculum will help me articulate to students exactly what and how they need to practice.

The Basic Skills Packet will be a combination of material from a few string and orchestra technique books, and some note-reading supplements.  The idea is to work out of the packet for warm-ups in first-year orchestra (fourth grade at CWS) and to use it as a Sam Hankins-style remedial bootcamp for students who’ve ” fallen behind” in orchestra in the 6th and 7th grade.