Week 4

Week 4
Violin progress is going well. Slow, but well. I assumed I would be practicing more, to be completely honest. But I am still making progress. I need to begin working on composing my violin exercises. Composing is challenging, but I have some ideas now after working on the violin for almost a month. The problem I keep facing is reconciling my mental perspective of how I should be progressing to my actual progress, which is way slow and requires a ton of work. But, I do see now that my idea for the "expert beginner" thing wasn't completely crazy. I do see a lot of improvement in my ability to begin this instrument now than if I had started it as my first instrument (obviously). But the point is that I can self moderate what kind of exercises I think would be helpful, not just going off what my teacher expects me to practice. I also have tried making up exercises. The difficulty is that, since I'm the only test subject in this research project, it's 100% subjective to my perspective. 
Let's Play Music is fun as always. I am preparing about 10 minutes of exercises to teach next week. These exercises include teaching the children to Lorie is really letting me do a lot within her class and I am super glad to get a unique teaching experience. I really feel a difference in my piano teaching. I've decided to incorporate more music theory into my piano curriculum, which is occasionally difficult because I can't put all these kids through Let's Play Music. LPM really makes the theory fun and exciting, which is something I'm obviously trying to do- but it's theory. Also, I find myself approaching notes differently. Generally, I just tell the kids the right answer when they miss a note, or have them try to fix it then assist. But after watching LPM, I've found there's a better way, and it has to do with pitch relations. They do it with solfegge, but also by naming the interval between the notes in a simple way (ie baby step, skip or leap). The kids get a sense for reading the shape of the melody, which, once they find their hand position, it becomes way easier for them to play correctly. The problem I see (potentially) in this, is that there becomes less of a focus on learning the notes and that becomes a little weaker as the kids just rely on "feeling" the way the song goes based on pitch relations. To modify this, I believe it's really useful to do what Let's Play Music does and stress all the notes separate from pitch relations. But it's difficult, in an unstructured piano curriculum like I have, it's difficult to really get the bridge between notes and pitches. Still working on a solution to this, and I am super excited to integrate this concept into my violin book. 
At this point, I feel like I am finally seeing a lot of benefits from doing this project. It feels like a good use of my time. Learning how to teach is a useful skill and learning the Violin is a unique challenge that I really enjoy.