Graham and I played the rhythm chart game and then when I went to take a picture, he fell to his knees and exclaimed, “Please, have mercy!” Never a dull moment during his lessons, huh? 
My new little beginner, Emily, continues to amaze me! I gave her the assignment of memorizing the alphabet backwards last week and she came back and spouted it off with no hesitation. We just played a quick game where I gave her a set of scale blocks and then timed her to see how fast she could arrange them going backwards. She clocked in at a little over 30 seconds. I told her I thought she could cut that time in half, so we tried it again and she blew that time out of the water with a new record of 11 seconds!
Emily again. (Can you tell I love working with beginning students?!) This time we were working on contrasting the forte and piano sections of her Old McDonald song. I pulled out my collection of colorful highlighter tape and let her choose the colors she thought best represented a forte sound and a piano sound. Then we tore off little pieces and she placed the corresponding colors over top of the dynamic markings. She really got into this and talked through her analysis of each color and what she thought it would sound like before settling on the two she chose.
Thursday evening I made the short trek to a neighboring town for Cynthia’s choir concert. Her choir teacher, upon finding out that Cynthia had composed a piece on the piano, asked her to play it in class one day and ended up programming it into the evening’s concert. You can barely see Cynthia in the bottom left hand corner of the picture, playing her beautiful composition while her friend performs an artistic dance on stage. What a special opportunity!
Saturday morning, our local music teachers association sponsored a Festival of Music. Several of my students participated and here Luke performs Benda’s Sonatina in A Minor.
Kind of a varied week in the studio (and around town, I guess!), but that’s what keeps teaching so fun!
