Check out these awesome e-cards that include music provided by some of the most prominent orchestras! But even better, for every one of these e-cards you send, Fidelity Investments will donate $1 to buy new musical instruments for local area students. I’m usually not a fan of e-cards, but I love this (and just sent off a whole stack of them )!

HT: Ed Flynn – thanks for passing this on to me, Ed!

Is everyone else trying to figure out what to give their students for Christmas this year? Anyone come up with any great ideas yet? I usually like to give something creative that will last longer than the time it takes for a piece of candy to make the journey from their mouth to their stomach. Still trying to come up with the perfect idea for this year…

One of my students’ favorite gifts was this Music Manuscript book I made for them a couple of years ago. Many of them still use their books for theory assignments or composition projects. I’ve made the complete file for this book available in the Music Matters Blog store in case any other teachers are interested in giving these to their students as a special gift. Just click the button below to download the file, save it to your computer, and then use it as often as you like to print books for your students. You can even e-mail the whole file to a print shop and have them run however many copies you need and bind them. The book is set up with margin spacing to allow for double-sided printing. Enjoy!

Music Manuscript Book | $5

My musical strength has always been sight-reading and it’s been a long process to develop any ability to play by ear. After reading this funny little anecdote my Dad sent me today, though, I’m feeling pretty good about myself…

The symphony musicians had little confidence in the person brought in to be their new conductor. Their fears were realized at the very first rehearsal. The cymbalist, realizing that the conductor did not know what he was doing, angrily clashed his instruments together during a delicate, soft passage. The music stopped. The conductor, highly agitated, looked angrily around the orchestra,
demanding, “Who did that? Who did that?”

Since I’m currently serving as the president of one of our local music teachers associations, one of my responsibilities is to write a letter for our quarterly newsletter. Just for fun I thought I’d post the article I wrote for the most recent newsletter…

Several years ago one of my students presented me with a beautiful scarf for Christmas. It had been hand-crocheted by her mother and I implored her to teach me how to make one myself. She patiently walked me through the steps and within a few minutes I had the basic stitch down. Over the next several months I found myself crocheting row after row of yarn into scarves and often tearing out huge sections to start over because the rows became uneven or the stitches were inconsistent. Finally I felt like I had mastered the scarf design and promoted myself into making baby blankets. Now the projects required more yarn and more time, but it was worth it to see the look of delight on my friends’ faces when I presented them with my hand-crocheted blankets as a gift for their precious newborns.

I’ve made many such blankets now and would be eager to proclaim that I am a master crochet artist were it not for one thing. You see, I only know how to do one stitch – the same stitch my student’s mother taught me more than three years ago. Oh sure, there was the couple months I made a foray into hats, but it was short-lived and I quickly returned to my lone stitch. It’s familiar. And comfortable. And safe. I know that when I use it, my blankets will turn out well. In fact, it hardly requires any effort at all anymore. I know there are tons of other stitches I could learn, but I was perfectly content to keep whipping off my own familiar blankets. Until last Wednesday.

My student Isabella sat in a chair in my studio handily crocheting a colorful scarf during her brother’s piano lesson. When it was time for her lesson, I asked if I could see what she was working on. She showed me her work of art and I was in awe. The stitches were beautiful! Much more intricate than my plain little stitch. I begged her to show me how she did it. She quickly pulled some more yarn from the skein and adeptly handled her crochet hook as she demonstrated the stitch for me. At that moment I was struck by the realization that with a bit of time and effort I could become skilled in implementing this stitch into my own crochet projects. Sure, I’d probably have to rip some rows out before it was mastered, but undoubtedly the end result would be well worth the risk involved in launching into the unfamiliar.

I am struck by the parallel between this enlightening experience and teaching. If we are not deliberately taking steps to learn new things and try new approaches in our teaching we can quickly fall into the rut of doing what is familiar and what requires the least effort. We keep using the same method books because we know them forward and backward and we like the results they produce. We keep teaching the same repertoire because we know exactly where all the trouble spots are and because the pieces sound flashy and impressive. We keep structuring our lessons the same way we always have because it feels comfortable and predictable. That’s why we all need an “Isabella” in our lives.

We need other teachers and experiences that open our eyes to the possibility of new approaches, that reveal the beauty of seeing students reach higher levels of musical understanding and ability than we thought possible, that teach us how to incorporate fresh ideas into our teaching. It may come in the form of a brilliant idea gleaned from the plethora of practice resources on howtopractise.com or in a helpful suggestion given by a workshop presenter or in a thought-provoking statement read in an article or in a handy teaching tip shared by a colleague in casual conversation. Perhaps it will mean carving time out to attend the next WMMTA informal coffee and chat at Wendy’s studio or taking the first step toward pursuing national certification or spending some time on-line looking for a fun activity to help a struggling student. The resources today are countless! But the question is, Are you willing to take the risk? To try something you’ve never tried before? To break out of the comfortable and familiar to explore possibilities that could lead you and your students to new musical heights?

I, for one, am excited about the possibilities. I won’t ever give up my familiar basic crochet stitch, but now I’m determined that my next blanket will consist of the beautiful new stitch that Isabella has inspired me to try!

~Natalie Wickham, NCTM

I just received an e-mail asking me if I know of any good resources for vocal pedagogy. I’m sure there are some blogs or websites out there that would be a great resource for vocal teachers, but since I don’t teach voice I’m afraid that I’m not much help in that area. So I thought I would see if anyone else has any suggestions. Anyone know of some good resources out there for vocal teachers? (And if not…looks like this is a niche that needs to be filled by one of you voice teachers! )

For those of you who are on Facebook, I’ve created a Blog Network for Music Matters Blog. I’m not totally sure how I’m going to use it yet, but I thought it seemed like a fun thing to do. I’d love to have you join the network!

Is everyone else equally crazy this time of year?! We just finished our Music Progressions evaluations this weekend – hooray! (So that’s my excuse for a dearth of posts this week.) I told my students I would even give them one week off of playing scales as a reward for all their hard work. They were thrilled! Now I’ve been thinking through some new things I want to try next year. I think I’m finally ready to take the plunge and offer an “official” computer lab in my studio. We do various technology-related things throughout the year, like recording CDs, participating in the Clavinova Festival (another one of my students just won a new Clavinova this month! That makes three from my studio now. If you have a Clavinova Festival in your area, I highly recommend it!), notating compositions in Finale, etc., but I’ve never offered a full-blown computer lab.

So, I’ve been exploring the Music Learning Community website more indepth and considering whether I should develop my computer lab around it to start with. I’ve heard wonderful reviews of it from lots of teachers and I know my students love the free games they play on it. The site offers “more than 450 web-based, fully interactive, multimedia learning games for music students — beginners through Level 4.” Pretty impressive!

Anyway, I’m putting this on my list of things to explore and figure out this summer. If any of you offer a computer lab or use Music Learning Community in your studio I’d love to know how it works for you and if you have any tips for someone just starting out.

When I taught Character First! Education classes in some of our local elementary schools, there was a Kindergarten teacher who had moved her piano into her classroom. All throughout the day she would take a seat at the piano and play little songs to help reinforce various grammatical rules, spelling, math facts, etc. The students loved it and the songs were such an effective way to help them retain information like this. I got a copy of the book she compiled with her songs and look forward to using it someday when I have children of my own that I am teaching.

I was thrilled to discover that there is an entire website full of Songs for Teaching! There are songs for a whole variety of subjects and lots of songs within each subject. To be honest, I didn’t care for some of the music (a few of the ones I listened to were more like a rap song and didn’t have much of a melody), but I think it would be easy enough to sing the lyrics to a different tune. Plus, I’ve only scratched the surface of the hundreds of songs available! They even have some music-related ones that might come in handy.

Here’s a fun way to start your Monday morning! (Check out the whole story behind this event here.)

HT: Chris Foley at The Collaborative Piano Blog

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