Shaking Things Up

Today was a pretty interesting day.  My final Junior Level 3 class on Monday nights is always a pleasure to teach: three girls who are always enthusiastic showing up to their lessons.  They're quite intelligent for their age and at the same time they're a really FUN bunch!  Sometimes during lessons they would just randomly get the giggles and wouldn't stop laughing for 10 minutes.  I try to keep things moving but really - what can you do? They're 8 years old and just being a kid lol.

Over the weekend (when I usually did my lesson plans) I had planned everything out: a part of this week's activities would cover our recital (which is next month!  Crunch time!) such as playing through our class tunes a few times smoothly with our digital sequence & then the next couple of weeks would cover student solo performances as well up until our big show.  On a side note this is a mandatory workplace recital where we get to host/feature our group classes and students as piano soloists.  It really is quite an exciting time. It's also a really unique & helpful learning experience for me.

     

Luckily with my JR3s we got through everything on time (with these girls in particular everything moves quite fast - they are so quick to pick up things! I love that).  So before we got to finish things off with a Key Signature memory cards game one-by-one the girls "took the stage" as a soloist at the big "teacher piano".  As I was guiding one of the students through a song called "Get Away" in the Alfred's Level series (the rhythm literally sounds like a horse galloping away on a field) the other two girls spontaneously grabbed some rhythm instruments off a shelf and started a "band" in the background to help keep the beat.

They were dancing and twirling on the carpet!  I give them full credit for coming up with this... they were being so creative.  They could be "backup rhythm dancers" for each other when they solo on stage in place of our digital accompaniment... It would be HUGE for the audience.  They were so excited and asked me a million times "Can you pls bring the box of rhythm instruments to the recital?"  I know this would really make things interesting!  We also came up with an "all-girl band" name for the class when I do the mic introductions... We'll have to see how it goes!