My Teaching Philosophy

 Learning happens best in a variety of ways:

• When students are given time/space to internalize information individually
• When students connect emotionally to information through social interactions, experiences, and experiments.
• When the environment is safe, both physically and emotionally.
• When content is engaging
• When they are able to ask questions and participate in their learning
• Through discovery and student involvement
• Through meaningfully planned lessons that may involve direct instruction, inquiry, discussion, etc....
• When instruction is individually catered to each student, as can be done with technology or other methods of differentiation.

Joyschool Finished

This year of Joyschool has proven such a wonderful experience. Not only does it provide meaningful time with my children, it also extends me to others around me. I have loved the experience this year. We focused on the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, numbers up to 10, and various life lessons. Since I plan on doing this again, I am going to write down some of the things I would like to include this year. I think some of the topics we had could be extended to a much larger units, such as
Wellness: stress/destressing, exercise, eating healthy foods, work, play
social skills: Being a peacemaker, sharing/taking turns (play games where we have to share or take turns), table manners, accepting differences, Making new friends, etc....
Safety: emergency preparedness, rules/laws,


One of the things that I would like to change during joyschool is feeling pressure to plan my lesson around the holidays. It felt like there was ALWAYS  a holiday coming up that we were basing our lessons around. I am okay including holidays with our curriculum, but it felt kind of silly like holidays were the only thing we needed to learn about. They are good to know.

I would like to be better at talking about the days of the week and months of the year. Perhaps I will make a fun joyschool calendar to follow. it will have different pictures to represent birthdays and holidays and we can talk about the days of the week and the months of the year as well as things coming up. It would be good for them to get a sens of time. Also with clocks. Maybe always do certain things at certain times and talk about those times. I liked having things open that we could be creative with our teaching and not feel bad if we didn't follow it exactly.

Post Recital

The Recital did prove motivating for everyone. So did the movie theme. Everyone had their pieces down, my son included. Now we are post recital. It is nice to move on to new things, and now I need to figure out what my students still need to learn. Being trained in teaching as well as in piano gives me some needed skills as a piano teacher. However, I have not had any formal training to be a "piano teacher." It leaves me wondering what there still is to learn for myself and what there still is to teach my students. Here are some things I have learned about piano:

1. It is more than technicalities. When you play with feeling, that's when you touch lives, including your own. There are different ways to play. People are disappointed when you accompany an upbeat song really slow and quiet. However, depending on the way you play a song, you can turn an upbeat song into a lullaby. Maybe that would be a fun thing to try. Give each person a simple song to play a specific way (in the manner of the adverb):  peacefully, angrily, happily, sadly, etc....

2. When you accompany someone, you have to be able to follow the singer/conductor. That would be a skill we could work on. They play, but they have to keep their eyes partly on me to follow what I am doing with my hand.

3. Playing the melody louder than the others parts.

Those give me some ideas for the next little while. It's amazing what good a little bit of reflection will do. We can focus on accompaniment skills for a while.

Lots to Reflect On

There have been lots of changes since I last blogged.

The biggest is that my son has started taking piano lessons from my niece. It is crazy seeing a piano lesson from two different perspectives: One: your own child is the one learning. Two: The one you teach is the one teaching. Needless to say, I have had to bite my tongue while I have watched these piano lessons. Is my desire to correct because I want so badly to see my son succeed? Or is it because I think of myself as the expert with the know-how, not my niece? I think there is some of both of that in there. Despite these concerns, I have found valuable qualities in my niece's teaching, and my son is doing just fine. Along with these, I have had a chance to reflect on my own teaching procedures and discovered valuable lessons I have learned throughout the years.

One of my concerns was that my son would not persevere if he did not have enough success playing his songs. His attention span is not that long, and I thought my niece's expectations might be a little bit high. After all, he has had no experience reading notes. (Yes, the concerns of a mother.) I am glad that I didn't tell my niece to just pass off his song. He has been able to reach the expectations of my niece with the diligent help of his teacher as well as his grandmother and parents. 

Motivation really is a continual battle for children when the newness of something has worn off. I didn't know what to do to motivate him. He is very strong-willed and can be difficult to persuade, but my niece and her mother took that concern and found a way to motivate my son. I am so grateful and inspired by their work. They created the cutest practicing chart that involved paw prints and a paw patrol figure reaching his friend in the helicopter. Each time he practiced, he got to color in a paw-print and move the figure. After thirty times, the figure reached his destination, and my son was taken to the dollar store to pick out a toy. Since then, he has had new charts made whenever he has reached his goal, which is usually within a week or two. They have continued to be motivating.

This has led me to think: How can I motivate MY older students? They are older. I have been using candy rewards for every ten times they practice. Candy is always motivating. But to create more intrinsic motivation, perhaps I could plan a recital for them to work up to. Or even create a tradition of a recital every year. I know my second oldest has asked for one. Spring is usually not too busy (aside from school), The theme this year could be movie scores. Another year could be classical pieces. Another theme could be folk songs. I could invite other teachers in my area to join in. It should be a big to-do, Create excitement. It will be fun to hear other pieces underneath each theme. What may be more motivating is the girls own ward  members participating.

There is more to reflect on, but I have a baby to tend to. 

Teaching How to Read Notes

My piano students could use some review and practice reading notes. I think the pseudonyms work pretty well and are good to know, but there are other techniques to figuring out the notes. So I would like them to be able to recite the phrases for each clef, but I don't expect them to do that while they are playing necessarily. Skills related to note-reading: 

Understanding of How the Staffs Relate to the Piano. 

• Following each note on the staff one-by-one, you are also going up the notes on the piano one-by-one.
• Any note can be written on either staff by adding the appropriate amount of "imaginary lines" underneath the original 5 lines.

Shortcut:

• Pseudonyms- FACE, Every Good Boy Does Fine, All Cows Eat Grass, Good Boys Do Fine Always.

A problem I have found teaching the pseudonyms is that it is hard to remember which clef the sayings are attached to. Perhaps I could think of a clever way to stick it in their memory.

FACE- our face is on top of our bodies and rhymes with space, therefore the correct placement is on the Treble Clef's spaces. 

Every Good Boy Does Fine- "Every" starts with the last letter of FACE, so they belong together.

All Cows Eat Grass- Grass is on the ground, therefore it belongs on the lower staff.

Good Boys Do Fine Always- Grass is Good.  (And Good starts with the same letter as Grass, so those two phrases belong together.)

Joyschool

Our Joyschool:

 A mother and I have started a Joyschool for our children. We had attempted to get together a bigger group of kids, but we have my child and a neighbor boy participating, which makes it a very small group. We decided we would like to focus on learning letters/reading along with other life themes. Just as importantly, we want to give our children an opportunity to interact with other kids their age and be exposed to a school-type setting.

Learning about "A" and Fiction/Non-fiction

Today I taught my first Joyschool lesson.  I wrote up a simple and sort of sloppy lesson plan, and I am sure glad I remembered to include an "Engage". This really helped get us started when my own son was causing problems. 

The boys were playing with toys, and I asked them to clean up. When my son refused, I mentioned that the person who I saw cleaning up the most would be able to pick the first object out of my bag. That got everyone moving. Both he and the other boy got to pick at the same time because they were both cleaning up really well. I was surprised how much they enjoyed coloring the page I printed off for them, and I was happy with the worksheet, that it allowed them to color inside block letters as well as tracing the A's. I think it gives good exposure to the structure of the different letters.

Today's theme was Literacy, so we read some books about Alligators (since Alligator starts with "A"), and talked about Fiction/Non-fiction. We made up our own fiction and non-fiction stories together. I was surprised at how well this went, that the boys grasped the procedure and went along with it. 

Further Reflection:

I wondered if I should have focused on teaching procedures more, rather than spending all the time on a lesson, but I think it went well. I have not sat down and figured out any specific rules or specific procedures. 

Keeping Younger Children Happy

One problem/distraction we had came from my youngest son, who was screaming because he wanted to bring his strawberries into the living room. After trying to calm him down and give him other options, I took him upstairs to cry and let him come back down when he was done crying. He did. So it all worked out. He did participate in each stage of the lesson, and that kept him engaged aside from his own personal issues of the day. I will always prepare enough materials for him to participate as well. He is a little young for complete participation in some of the activities we have, so perhaps I will need to take this into consideration and provide similar, but separate, materials to participate with. I should take care of personal business before Joyschool starts. For example, I think he was fussy from teething. Perhaps I should have given him medicine before class started.

Transitioning into the Classroom

My children are probably always going to be playing with toys while we wait for the other child to show up. So when he gets here, it is natural for him to join in. Perhaps next time I will let them play for a few more minutes instead of expecting them to clean up right away. I will set a timer for five minutes, and then we will clean up. I will always want to have an engage ready to get them excited about moving to the next activity.

Place for Instruction

Our lessons will vary, but one problem we had was that everyone was crowding me and trying to get the bag first. There needs to be a form of order. After they are done cleaning up, I will have them sit on the couch, or on the floor, depending on what we are doing, so that I can explain the procedures for our engage/lesson. It would probably be best just to keep one place so they can go there without me needing to remind them.

Raising Hands?

I don't think I am going to enforce raising hands because I feel like that will cause more problems enforcing than it will solve when we only have two children. I want them to be able to interact and be a part of their learning.

Me as a Teacher

What I've got:
As I have been thinking about how to help my students succeed, I have come to a conclusion: that if I want my students to be polished and accomplished, I need to be that way myself. I can play most if not all the hymns at church with little problem. I have accompanied singers and choirs at church as well. Individually at home I enjoy singing along to songs that I can sight read and play. Others I have been working on for a while. Some of my skills on the piano have transferred to the organ, which requires some new techniques that come in handy while playing the piano as well.

With that said, I also have room to grow, (and lots of it). While teaching one of my students, we came across a glissando. I wondered if there was an official way to approach playing one, as I had never been taught that. On YouTube, we found a demonstration, which greatly improved the way we were playing the glissando. I would like to find some songs that use glissando and learn other techniques as well. I have only played so high as a 16th note or a triply (if that is even what they are called). I would like to learn and perfect some other piano techniques that are not as common in every day accompaniment.  Occasionally, I have to ask my mother (who also taught piano lessons) what something is called or for help counting out a difficult rhythm. I would like to be at the point my mother is at and to continue to grow in my piano expertise.

What I would like to know:
Today I attempted to play something that looked like a triply, but instead of three notes, there were 7 that you were supposed to fit into one count. I would have appreciated an example of what that sounds like. What is it called when you have a note with three lines on top? a 32nd note? And what is the counting strategy teachers are using for those? I can only remember ever playing a 16th note. I want to learn how to play faster. I hear pianists that play really fast. Are they doing glissando some of that time? Or what tricks do they know to accomplishing that?


Is there a use for learning to play classical music, even if it doesn't appeal to you? Is there something inherent in classical music that other more modern pieces don't have? Some old piano music seems dull and void of feeling. I have not played much classical music, but I also don't particularly enjoy listening to classical piano music. Maybe I have not been exposed to the right pieces. That is another aspect of teaching that I should improve: my knowledge of classics.

How I plan to get there:

My husband has been wanting to learn to play the piano, and he has a system that will teach him how to play. I am thinking that some of it will be simple if it is starting from the beginning, but it also might offer some useful instruction. It might give me ideas for teaching my students as well as for filling in the blanks in my piano knowledge.

I would like to work up a challenging piece to play at the next piano recital and learn the techniques I don't know through YouTube and Google.