I have a student who is 13 yrs old. He is extremely passionate about playing the piano and can sit down and create songs by ear, but his reading skills are far behind. He recognizes this and wants to take the time to learn, but many of the methods seem too young for him and […]
Teaching
Free eBook – Go Play
Have you seen Catherine Shefski’s free eBook, “Go Play“? One of the teachers in our local association alerted us to it and we used it as the basis for our discussion at our local association meeting last week. Our official discussion topic was, “The Millenial Student,” and another teacher also shared several recent magazine articles […]
Free Music Software
Here’s another little gem I came across recently: GNU Solfege. It’s a free music education software, specifically designed to “train your rhythm, interval, scale and chord skills.” It includes interval recognition, interval singing, rhythmic dictation, chord singing, scales, and harmonic progressions. I’ve downloaded it and started using it a little bit, and it seems like […]
Fabulous Sight-Singing Resource!
In my searching around for various resources to support my theme this year, I came across this fabulous sight-singing book called, “Eyes and Ears“! The book is available as a free download and is a treasure trove of sight-singing melodies, organized in a systematic manner that are perfect for my purposes. I love the explanations […]
September Surprise!
Many of you know that I hold a September Surprise! kickoff event for my students each year. Since I take off the whole month of August, this gives them a chance to work on whatever they want in order to “surprise” me at the kickoff. We held the September Surprise! last Thursday evening and it […]
Ready or Not, Here They Come!
Today is the day! My fall semester officially begins this morning. It’s been nice to have a month to plan and prepare, and now I’m very ready to start. Not because I’m organized-ready, mind you, but because I’m so excited to see all my students again. 🙂 Last week, I was still feeling pretty overwhelmed […]
