Overdue October Update

Yes, I'll admit, I was way more excited about sharing our recently-uploaded music video than posting the October update. My apologies! But, a week later than usual, here's what was new in the last month. 

   Normally October is a pretty dull month to blog about, but not this time! This time I tried something very new and very exciting: group lessons! 

   Normally I teach private lessons, which are great. But for the week following Thanksgiving, I split my students into three groups instead. We spent an hour per group doing some low-pressure performing and doing different activities. Activity #1 was a rhythm game. Students took turns rolling dice to randomly select a note value, and I added the matching note value onto Zoom's whiteboard. Then they worked together to figure out where the bar lines would go. As you can imagine, sometimes this meant rearranging the random notes to make sure there were four beats and not five in a measure! 

   For activity #2, I found this online quiz that worked really well. Because it's multiple-choice, many of the students who didn't know the correct answer still did well at figuring it out! 

   And that's where I ran into a problem. I had thought that, with performing and such, I would only need two activities. But when everyone's songs are short, performing gets done in about 10 minutes! So after the online quiz, I was doing everything on the fly. We practiced a bit of solfege, and did some melody playbacks (which were fun, since students were allowed to modify the playbacks as they went after the first round). 

   Other than that... October had a lot of fall-themed activities. And choosing Christmas music. And you'll have to bear with me from now till Christmas. Now that we've gotten our first snowfall, it may as well be an eight-week long December in my head. ;)