Introduction

I teach orchestra to 7th, 8th and 9th graders and I love it!  I look forward to going to work each day and working with my students to progress and be amazing.  My class motto for my classroom is just that:  Be Amazing.  I believe all students have tremendous potential to accomplish anything they desire to do.  I am always impressed by my students....they work hard.  Some have many challenges in their lives, yet they persist in doing all they can do.

I like to think that I am creative and I try to keep my students motivated through a variety of activities and games.  Sometimes, I need inspiration, so I turn to the internet for ideas.  I have found that there is very little information on the internet specifically for orchestra classrooms.  So here I go into the internet frontier to share some of the things I do in my orchestra class to keep things interesting and fun.  I would love to hear ideas from other teachers out there, if any ever find my random little site.

I have many things I would like to share, but first I will start with how I decorate my orchestra classroom.  Perhaps 'decorate' is too strong of a word.  I really am not a decorater and my room is not cute, but my goal is to motivate my students with what I put on my walls and bulliton boards.  At the beginning of the year, I searched for quotes about music and about hard work.  I made my own posters and posted them in my room.  It is simple, homemade and best of all....free!  Here are a couple of the posters I made for my room: