Rehearsal Activity - Do you sound how you think?

 

Here's my lesson plan from today!  It's a super fun and effective way to help students pay attention to their technique and musicality.  

Personally, I love to introduce my lessons with a fun video.  This is the video I showed at the beginning of class:

In the video, the paintings are supposed to look like the people posing.  Unfortunately, the paintings looked nothing like the actual people.  In orchestra class, we are supposed to look a certain way when we play (accurate left hand and right hand technique, bowing, etc) and we are supposed to sound a certain way when we play the music.  Let's see what we really look like and sound like!

I made a simple slide show and I had a student walk around the room with a chromebook and take pictures to insert into the slide show.   It's easy and fast because with a chromebook, you can take pics and insert them directly into Slides by clicking on INSERT: IMAGE: CAMERA.  I have a student TA in each of my classes and that is who I had take all the pics.  If you don't have a TA you can have students take turns taking pictures...or if you have a student with a broken arm or something...here's a way to include them!  The pictures show left hand technique, straight bows, crooked bows, instrument placement...all things students don't always notice when they are playing.  At the end of class, I showed the slide show and it was super fun.  Student want to do this activity again!

Here's a shortened preview of one of my classes slide shows.  This particular TA added arrows to point out specifics and she even took a picture of me with a saggy violin!  haha  

Throughout the rehearsal, I took video of various passages and we listened back to see if we were sounding how we want and need to sound for a fabulous performance.  Students were very motivated to make changes and fix intonation when they heard the problem passages for themselves.  We were also able to listen to some well-played passages and celebrate progress.