Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Greetings!  I just wanted to make sure anyone and everyone knows about the upcoming TeachersPayTeachers sale - Teachers are Heroes!

On Wednesday, February 25th, everything sitewide is going to be 10% off using promo code HEROES, and many stores will be an additional discount up to 20%.  My store is going to be 20% every item, so by combining the two discounts you can save 28% on anything I have listed.  This is a great opportunity if you're looking at possibly purchasing any of my Boomwhacker resources or beginning band or orchestra arrangements.  Those are the most expensive items in my store, so this is a great chance to scoop them up at a discount.  Here are direct links to each item:

Boomwhackers Introduction Powerpoint

Mary Had a Little Lamb Boomwhacker

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1 with Heart Beats

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1 with Notation

Boomwhacker Song Collection #2 (Pentatonic Songs)

Great Big Boomwhacker Collection

Orff Instrument Bar Labels with Boomwhacker Colors

Big Rock Candy Mountain for Violin

Chameleon for Elementary Band

Kookaburra for Elementary Band


Alternately, you can click the link below to go directly to my storefront:

Have a great week, everyone!

Product Review - Sherman's Bass Rosin

Wow, back so soon?  It's almost like a regular blog or something!

Today is a product review day - maybe some day if I get truly organized I can have a regular product review day of the week.  Wacky Wednesdays?  Weekly Wednesdays of Wonder?  Wow.  I'll have to work on that.  If anyone has a better suggestion I am all ears.

Enough with the word play, on to the review!  Today we're talking about Sherman's Bass Rosin.

This is something I bought just out of a need (more like desperation, really) as I had zero rosin for my school's double bass.  This became especially important when I had a student who was interested in playing said double bass - the first time since the instrument came to the school that someone other than me would be using it.

All of my experience with bass rosin prior to purchasing the Sherman's was with Pop's Bass Rosin - the stuff that comes in the little red plastic tub with the attached lid; you open it up and there is the rosin cake sitting in a little paper cup.

This stuff.  Notice the paper medicine cup.

I always had the feeling that this was someone's solution to dealing with the mess of making rosin who cared more about their post-production cleanup than the actual end user's experience.  The paper cup is good in theory, but as you use the rosin you have to peel the sides down, which inevitably (for me, anyway) led to sticky fingers, the awful sensation of the bow scraping the paper, and a lot more mess than I felt was truly necessary.  And heaven help you if you ever leave the rosin somewhere warm.  Good luck prying it out of that cup.  It's like trying to chip off an ice block without the aid of melting.

Enter the Sherman's rosin.

This stuff.  In case you forgot.

It comes in a regular wooden tray just like any other student rosin - almost like bass players are considered to be the same as the violinists, violists, and cellists!  I know, crazy town.  The nice thing about these trays is that they allow for true shadow bowing while you rosin.  This is how I have students practice their bow technique - hold the rosin about where your bridge would be and bow, whether you're bowing a song or just back and forth.  The idea is to reinforce the muscle memory on straight bowing, which is so wonderfully facilitated by the sides of the wooden (sometimes plastic) trays.  The downside to the trays is also one of their strengths.  The ends of the tray are open, so there is nothing holding the edges of the rosin back.  This means that if you have a student who drops their rosin like one of mine did last week, it will not only chip and crack, but also start to fall out.  So perhaps this isn't the best solution from a durability standpoint.

As far as performance of the actual rosin, I have not noticed any difference between the Sherman's and the Pop's rosin.  I will be completely honest in that I have not really paid attention to the sound quality of the rosin in particular, but I have not noticed students having more or less issues using either rosin.  At the very least I can say it does not cause any more issues that the Pop's rosin.

And now my favorite part of my Sherman's Bass Rosin experience: the price.  Sherman's rosin costs $3.95 over at Johnson String Instrument (they also sell through Amazon), while the Pop's rosin is listed at $8.95.  Now, I am all for paying extra for higher quality when necessary, but if you're in a situation like mine where students have far more important things to worry about than their particular grade of rosin, I'll take a major cost savings where possible.  Like I tell my students - get to where you can play all of your notes and rhythms 100% correct 100% of the time and we'll worry about the tiny details then.  Now that is not to say that I wouldn't attribute any kind of benefit to improving the quality of your rosin.  Quite the opposite.  If it helps you play better I am all for it.  The thing is, I'm tired of hearing students talk about their playing difficulties like there is some magical accessory out there that will make up for their lack of consistent practice.

"No, really, Mr. Earley, if I get this $200 rosin that was pressed from old growth Douglas Fir trees in virgin forest land in the Pacific Northwest I'll totally be able to play everything perfectly.  My fifteen minutes of practice a week might even be able to be reduced to ten!"

Not me.  I am not an Asian woman.  Just to be clear.

Right.  More like if you practiced five minutes a week it would be a 500% improvement over the current time spent with the instrument.

But that's the cynical music teacher in me that gets tired of being "fibbed" to on a weekly basis.

And I digress.



So my overall impression and recommendation?

Sherman's Bass Rosin is an excellent value for the money, especially for a student who doesn't have issues with dropping things.  I would love to have a student who progressed far enough that I could hear a limitation of this rosin, but I teach 3-5 strings.  Maybe if it was high school I'd have someone at that point, but not at the elementary level.

Also, as a side note - I am giving very serious thought to an experiment.  I'd like to see if I could re-melt the rosin to get rid of the cracks from it being dropped.  I watched a video of a guy making rosin, and have heard of folks who make their own regularly, so it looks to me like it's a question of getting to the right temperature, holding it long enough, then allowing the rosin to cool properly.

If any of you read a news story about a music teacher from Maryland getting killed by his girlfriend for messing up her oven, you'll know that's me.

Also not me.  But the beard is at least heading in the right direction.

But more on that later.

Wow, that's a bit of a break....

Let me start off by apologizing to my followers - all both of you.  I did not intend to take such a long break from my blog, it just kind of happened.  So with that said, here's a quick summary of what I've had going on this school year:

- I started the year with a student intern named Grace, and she had some of the most original ideas for elementary music I've ever seen.  We did an activity with a loop pedal for her second observation and had the students create a loop-based composition using improvised body percussion and vocal sounds.

- I have students who are struggling like never before to play brass instruments.  Two trombones and a trumpet, all three who started at the same time; one of the trombones plays everything too low, the other trombone and trumpet play everything too high.  It's making for a bit of a beginning band struggle.

- I was observed by my principal doing concert prep.  Very strange.  We dissected the form of one of their concert pieces which made for a very useful lesson, but I'm a little concerned it cost me some valuable time that could have been spent on performing and rehearsing.  The neat thing is that I  think I did the best lesson on form that I have ever done, and I will absolutely use it as a touchstone throughout the year.  (Also pretty awesome is that the write-up for my observation was overwhelmingly positive - we'll see how that comes up in the post-observation conference.)

- I have second grade students working on rhythmic fluency using pool noodle notes as well as a worksheet I created.  They are using the noodles to work out rhythms in three dimensions and getting used to drawing notes on the paper, which is a pairing of ideas I got from Tracy King over at Mrs. King Rocks.  If you haven't already, go check out her blog and then her Teachers Pay Teachers store, they're both pretty fantastic.

- First grade and Kindergarten have been working on found sounds, body percussion, and enhancing stories with sound effects and music.  This is especially great around this time of year as I have found many great Halloween-related activities.  As a side note, I have no students at my school with any kind of religious or cultural barriers to celebrating the various holidays throughout the year; I cannot begin to tell you how much easier that makes my job.

My beginning band and strings groups are making progress, painful though it is to listen to at times.  My choir is off to a good start, though I suspect I could be pushing them a little harder.  We have honor chorus starting this week, which I am really looking forward to (aside from fighting traffic to make it to the rehearsals on time).  In about 2 1/2 weeks we have our fourth and fifth grade concert, which should be interesting.  Here's to hoping we pull it off in time!

So that's what's going on in my world, how about yours?

Forgotten Instrument Records

I don't know about you, but a kid who forgets their instrument is the bane of my existence.  For some reason, printing out a monthly calendar that shows EVERY SINGLE DAY a kid will need their instrument isn't clear enough.  For some reason, having classes meet on the same days EVERY WEEK isn't regular enough.  For some reason, kids seem to think "I was in a rush." is a good reason to forget their instrument.

Ugh.

Incidentally, the worst part is when it's my private students who forget.  Because clearly you won't need the instrument that you are paying someone to tutor you individually on.  Sigh.

But I digress.

I have been trying to come up with a solution to this problem since day one of my teaching career.  I've written letters home, sent home form notes, sent home handwritten notes, sent emails, made phone calls, written student names on the board, included it as a comment in report cards, had face-to-face conversations with parents... You name it, I've probably tried it.  I even had kids copying out of the dictionary (regular and the Harvard Dictionary of Music).  Nothing seems to truly work.

So I am going to try something I just stumbled across.  The No Instrument Binder.  This is less a means of prevention (which I am still looking for) and more a means of tracking.  This was originally intended as a No Homework Binder, and the idea came from the blog "Teach - Bake - Love."  The original idea was to have each student write their name and the reason why they forgot their homework, and then put their homework in the binder.  This helps with organization, tracking student work, keeping up with grades, etc.  The only catch is that as a music teacher, I really don't assign "homework" per se.

So what I am going to try is to have kids write their name and the date in the binder, along with the reason why their instrument is not in class.  I think to start out I will allow students to write "I was in a rush." as their reason, but I suspect that once it becomes obvious how many of those lame excuses I get I will require a little more thought to go into it.  Hopefully this works better than my patented "Mr. Earley is disappointed and frustrated by your lack of responsibility" look that I give.  We'll see.  Check back for developments, I plan to create this over Spring Break and give it a limited run to the end of the school year.

Wow, it's been a while...

Greetings internet!

I should have realized that keeping up with this blog would become a challenge once the school year really heated up. Thankfully I come bearing good news.

As with many music teachers I find myself constantly fighting the practice battle with my instrumental students. Even the ones who are motivated. In some ways u feel like I am making proofread on that front through music selection and bribery (I may have offered baked goods in exchange for stellar performance in our most recent concert), but in many ways I feel like it is the same uphill fight to get students to pick up their instruments, let alone put in quality practice time.

Thankfully I was in Pinterest the other day and came across a fantastic article from NPR about practicing and how students might be motivated to do more of it.

Getting kids to practice music without tantrums or tears - via NPR.

I will definitely be employing some of the ideas from the article, and I already emailed the link to all of my band and orchestra parents.

I am especially intrigued by the idea of using practice beads as a visual reminder of what has been covered and accomplished. To use them as described would definitely take some training by both the teacher and parents, but it is something I am seriously considering adapting to use in my classroom.

So there is my thought for this evening, hopefully I can get some rest tonight!

Mary Had a Little Misfire...

It occurred to me that when I assigned my beginning strings students the task of figuring out "Mary Had a Little Lamb (MHALL)" by ear, not everyone would succeed.  I expected that, and told the students that while I didn't expect it to be perfect that I did at least expect some progress from each of them.  What I had not counted on was to have 90% of my students come back whining about how hard it was and how they didn't know how and couldn't do it and it was so unfair.

Really?

Apparently I'm just a mean music teacher who wants to see my kids fail.

Wait, what?

Since I gave my students the starting pitch (F#), and told them it only used the three notes they knew at that point, I kind of thought that they would be able to at least get a rough idea of how the song went.  Especially after we sang it together several times in class, and I had a fairly solid feeling that everyone knew how MHALL went. 

So it looks like next week we will be discussing two things - the importance of sticking with an assignment, regardless of how daunting it may be, and how you can make a pretty good guess about what the next note in a song is just by knowing if it is higher or lower than the previous one.  Especially when you only have three choices. 

Now, in all fairness, not everyone complained, not everyone came in with tales of how impossible the given task was.  I actually had a handful of kids who could play MHALL or some approximation.  That's exactly what I was looking for, just a starting point to get them playing using the new notes they had just learned.  There were a few kids who, when asked to play what they had figured out, froze in the spotlight and couldn't seem to remember how to hold their instrument.  We'll work on that later.  For right now, I want to get the rest of the group up to speed on actually attempting an assignment rather than either giving it two or three halfhearted minutes and giving up or just not trying at all and giving me some lame excuse.

I hate lame excuses. (I forget where I picked it up, but I have been known to tell students "Excuses are like armpits.  Everyone has one and they usually stink!")

Next week I am going to teach everyone "Hot Cross Buns" and have them attempt to figure that out by ear.  This time, though, I will give them some more structure, spend some time dealing strictly with the rhythm of the song and have that written out for them to refer to. I might even given them a sheet with the rhythm written out and blanks for them to fill in the note names. 

We'll see how that goes.

More about practice...

Continuing the theme from the last post, let's talk some more about practice.  Specifically, how does one get a 3rd, 4th, or 5th grader to practice.  Today I once again had the joy of having my third grade strings class (all twenty of them - holy cow!).  I'm already seeing the patterns in who practices and who does not.  Part of me thinks that there is not much to be done about that at this point.  But part of me thinks that there has to be some solution to get students motivated to practice.

So here is the plan:

Today's class was about using one and two fingers on the D string for the first time.  I spent a good five minutes just going around and correcting hand positions (why do students have great hand position until you ask them to move one finger?  Suddenly I had kids using the wrong hand, turning their hand around, and shifting way up the neck of the instrument!.  Once I felt we had some measure of success with basic finger placement I had everyone play a couple exercises out of the book just using E and F#.  Once they had been through those (though admittedly it was toward the end of class and I was trying to push for just a little more time), I gave the students their challenge - figure out "Mary Had A Little Lamb."  Yes, it's in your book, no it isn't called that.  No, I don't want you to find it in the book.  Yes, I am serious.  Yes, I do think you can do it, you know all the notes now.  No, really, this is completely possible.

The best part was that there were quite a few students who looked genuinely excited to give it a go.  That doesn't mean everyone, or even a majority, but it was nice to see what looked liked some enthusiasm for going home to practice.  The other best (bester? Bestest?) part? Even if most of these kids only give it a halfhearted effort, I would be willing to bet it's more practice than they've been doing. Given that some kids still can't figure out which hand to hold the violin/viola with, anything to get them playing has got to be an improvement.  I don't expect many of them to come back Thursday morning and really be able to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb," but I am hopeful that most of them will try.

This also highlights my beef with many strings method books - why, oh why do method books start on open strings and then immediately move to G on the D string?  Is going from no fingers to three fingers really the best way?  Instead I have my students find the E exercise (#14 in Essential Elements 2000 for Strings, Book 1), then once they have mastered that (and don't get nearly so many thunking sounds), we go backward to the F# exercise (#11 in EE2000).  Once they have the hang of that, we go to the G exercise (# 10 in EE2K - and I believe I will be calling it that from now on).  Once they have the idea down for each of the first position notes on the D string, then I have them fill in all of the exercises in between that we have skipped.  I also have several exercises that I wrote myself that I pass out and have the kids work on using only open D and first finger E.  All in all there ends up being quite a bit for students to work on in this very beginning stage of using only a few fingers on one string. 

I'm including a link to the scores for  my D& E exercises - hopefully you'll get some use out of them!
Exercise1  -  Exercise 2  -  Exercise 2.5  -  Exercise 3  -  Exercise 4


I will try to remember to update our "MHALL" progress after Thursday's class. My fingers are crossed!

Practice makes... Something...

Today I got a piece of news that I love to hear.  A student of mine, a beginning violist, spent something like an hour and a half the other night practicing on her own in her brand new strings book.  She came in this morning and told me she's already done the first 11 pages (the class is still on page 5).  I love to hear that a student is so motivated and willing to push themselves beyond what we are currently working on as a group.  I wish I had more students like that, students who are so eager to learn and do and create that they don't wait for instruction to be given to them; instead they want to blaze a trail on their own and ask for help only when they feel they need it.

Of course, like all things, this comes with a caveat.  While it's great that she is so motivated, I worry about any bad habits she might develop forging ahead on her own.  I also wonder how faithful she is being to proper technique, and how in-depth her practice is going.  Is she actually working out the notes and rhythms to be able to play them correctly, or is she glossing over some things just to get to the end?  Is she focusing on tone quality and a good, characteristic sound, or is her viola just making whatever sound it makes and that's it?

I feel like I need to overhaul my method of teaching students how to practice.  Clearly it does not do to only have one or two students motivated to practice, which is precisely what I am hearing right now (strange, both students whose parents have told me they are extremely motivated are third grade violists...). Practice needs to be something that is both useful and fun, otherwise it serves no purpose.  But how do you get a student to understand that practicing is fun?  And that down the road they will reap benefits that they currently cannot see?  I remember the feeling of standing in my parents' basement holding my brand new trombone in fifth grade and honking away for 5 minutes or so before getting frustrated that I didn't know how to do anything.  I wasn't a strong enough music reader to be able to pick up much from the texts, and I couldn't decipher the more advanced music in our method book.  I tried halfheartedly to pick out a few tunes by ear, but felt like the instrument was too cumbersome to be able to accomplish anything.

I don't want my students to feel that they don't know enough to make the next step on their own.  I also suspect that in a perfect world the motivation to practice and the benefits of practicing go so obviously hand-in-hand that all students grasp the importance of individual work.

Unfortunately, I suspect that so often in this world of standardized testing and group-think that the importance of each group member working out their own difficulties and facing their own barriers is downplayed.  The worst part is that students are avoiding practice because of the things they don't know during a time when the information they need to improve and succeed is more available than ever before.  In a brief search of YouTube I know I can come up with pages and pages of trombone lessons or clarinet lessons or violin lessons.  I'm fairly certain we can even find lessons on the serpent or ophicleide if we wanted.

But do students know this?  And more importantly, do they understand the incredible power that can give them?  Granted, watching internet videos, no matter how hi-def and in-depth, will never replace having a good teacher; the hands-on supervision of a lesson or ensemble can't be duplicated by the internet.  I find myself thinking that maybe my practice focus needs to shift on teaching students not only how to play and how to practice, but also how to find guidance and inspiration outside of class. If I can get a handful of students each year to find inspiration to work on their own who wouldn't otherwise do so, that would be a major victory.

I wish someone had told me just how much I could accomplish on my own with the right tools when I was in elementary music.  I can't help but wonder where that might have taken me.

Thoughts?