Music brought me through some of the hardest times in my life, and my goal as a music teacher is always to instill a love for music in my students. In my classes, we "do" music as much as possible so that my students can experience how music can touch their lives. On any given day, you will find my students hard at work learning new skills on their instruments, studying how composers make different sounds in music, or watching other performers to help us improve our own playing.
My students all live in the downtown area and they are all unique, creative, and have a wide variety of talents but they all do have one thing in common: MUSIC!
Whether it is listening to music, playing music on their instruments, performing music at home, in our school, or out in the community, or going to live performances, all of my students love music.
My Project
Every teacher benefits from spending a week surrounded by other teachers from all across the country who do the same thing every day as they do. This project will help cover the cost of registration for a week-long String Teacher Workshop put on by Ohio State University.
This workshop is designed to improve teaching methods of all who participate.
All teachers also know that good professional development can be a game-changer as well as an energizer in improving instruction in their classrooms.
Two of the sessions that I will be attending at this conference focus on peer-to-peer learning through teaching kids to mentor other students. One session deals specifically with orchestras that have players with a wide range of ability levels all playing within the same orchestra. The session will be teaching me how to seat them so that the students with higher level abilities can mentor the students who are still developing playing skills.
The other session I am going to that involves peer to peer learning is a session on chamber music and teaching me how to best set up my chamber ensemble's with both strong and weak players and make them successful. This involves having again the players with stronger playing skills handling the harder parts and helping the weaker players to learn their parts and be successful in playing chamber ensembles
The Ohio State University String Teacher Workshop is highly regarded across the country as one of the best professional development experiences for String Teachers. They have classes that help teachers improve their teaching methods on all four orchestral instruments and lots of opportunities to play, to hear other players, share ideas, and collaborate with other string teachers. There are so many benefits of attending this workshop and I always want to continue to better my work as a string teacher.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Prescott and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
