I Am Exhausted!

Well, I have my largest class of beginners ever.  50.  It has been a bit more challenging than I expected...I see so many students that need help with holding their instrument and holding the bow right...it can be overwhelming.  After 2 days of teaching them some basics, I felt like I was failing.  Too many to help in a sea of students.   So, today I tried something new.  I divided my class into 4 groups.  I taught one group some basics and fixed bow holds/position.  Meanwhile, on the other side of my class, I had students take a quiz where they label the parts of the instrument.  In the band room, I had 2 other groups playing games.  One game was just bow games where they try to keep a life-saver candy on their bent thumb.  The other game was Staff Twister.  I found these whiteboard spinners on Amazon.com:

 http://www.amazon.com/Educational-Insights-SpinZone-Magnetic-Whiteboard/dp/B001XUPG8M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377914764&sr=8-1&keywords=spinner+classroom

I made a large staff on the floor using masking tape.  Then I used 2 spinners on the whiteboard...one of them pointed to left foot, right foot, left hand, or right hand.  The other spinner pointed to which line or space on the staff students should cover.

It worked great to divide my class, and I felt I was able to get a lot more done...even though kids had to rotate to a different station every 10 minutes.