Blogging

I am thinking about setting up a blog to use with my string students. I am considering using Blogger, but am also looking for other suggestions. Got one? I would love to hear about it!

Concert Time!

And thus begins the end of the year concert season. My concert at church is this Friday night. I am very thankful to finish up most of my "getting ready" tonight, as the rest of the week is very busy. It should be an exciting concert, the 4th graders are playing When I Survey the Wondrous Cross on recorder, as well as Do Lord. I wasn't sure if it would come together or not, but I guess the Lord is going to be merciful as it sounded great last week.

Hooray for Friday!

I am so blessed not to have any commitments tonight. I have been able to do some cleaning, organize last year's lesson plans (from church) and get caught up on typing up this years plans. Our K-4th concert is towards the end of May and I only have 7 classes left, so concert planning has been also added to the list. While planning the concert at church is a lot of work (in many ways more work than planning my concerts for my string kids), it is relatively low stress because I program things we have been working on over the course of the year. The challenge is planning material that the parents haven't heard before. I have been teaching some of the 4th graders since they were in kindergarten!

Since the kindergarten and 1st grade will perform together for the concert, I started having them come together last week. It is nice because instead of teaching five classes each week, now I am only teaching four. The downside is that now 20 kids are trying to have a music class in a room that is too small for us. And yes, we do folk dancing--which to the passerby looks like controlled chaos. Today's challenge: multitasking. Two of the girls in the class are sisters. While they are a year apart they are so similar that it is easy to mistake them for twins. This proved to be a problem for me as I had a hard time remembering who was who while I was trying to teach them how to do-si-do, keep the chaos under control, and be some child's partner. It really is a riot. But thankfully each week gets a little better as they (slowly) learn to discipline/control their dancing. At least the small room keeps them confined as we are working on it!