Students who practice wrong notes and rhythms at home bring those mistakes to class. Often you will spend more time getting them to unlearn those wrong notes than if you’d just spent the time spoon-feeding them the right notes in the first place.
How To Practice Sight Reading
Educators agree: sight reading is important. It develops musical literacy, challenges students technically and musically, and checks for understanding of important music theory skills.
Teaching Technique with SmartMusic: Free Lesson Plan
How do you help your students prepare for an important audition? Have you tried making etudes the focus of an entire lesson plan?
Free Repertoire and Lesson Plan for Teaching Technique
Incorporating instrumental technique into your lesson plans doesn’t have to be dry and boring. In a previous blog post, we outlined ways that you can make teaching technique more accessible and fun for your students.
3 Ways to Include Technique in Your Music Lesson Plan
When I was a young student, my conscientious teacher put me on the standard regimen to learn my instrument. We began with scales, moved on to technique and etudes, and ended with solo music.
Bob Phillips on Helping Students Practice Effectively
Bob Phillips is widely renowned as an innovator in string education. An award-winning ASCAP composer with 27 years of experience as a public school string teacher, he is also the author of several popular methods—all published by Alfred Music—including String Explorer and Sound Innovations.
Help Your Students Practice This Summer
It’s an unspoken rule of music education that students don’t practice over summer break. As teachers know, the appeal of Netflix and naps can easily get in the way of productivity (be honest, you haven’t organized your library of sheet music or large instrument closet), but we also know how important it is that students do something on their instruments over the summer so that the long break doesn’t undo all the work that happened during the school year.
Music Practice Tips from a Dog
Sometimes it takes looking at something in a different way to truly understand it. More than a decade of private tuba lessons, symphony concerts, brass quintet rehearsals, and a music degree taught me a lot about music.