For my second practicum observation, I’m going to discuss my time at the Young

Children’s Program.

Classroom management

● One of the largest strategies I’ve noticed about my teaching that I am continuing to work

in is keeping the energy level up in class by being enthusiastic myself

● Another strategy I’ve noticed that helps the classroom management is limiting downtime

in between activities.

● I’ve realized that we need to continue to work on ways to best engage the students when

passing out the violins. That’s when they seem to be the most distracted, so us teachers

need to continue to work on that so we can continue to have efficient lessons.

● Making sure the students are not too close to each other when they have the violins

because they become distracted with what the other students are doing if they are directly

next to the students

● Lastly, I’ve noticed that the students respond well when we give them a brief overview of

the class before we start teaching for the day and before we hand out the violins. That

way the students are listening and not distracted by the instruments.

Music Pedagogy

● Singing the note the students will play before they play it so they have the note in their

head

● Demonstrating ourselves what we want them to play on the violin a couple of times

before they play

● Having a mixture of more general music activities and violin-specific activities because it

fatigues them less quickly

● Mixing activities that we have already done before and bringing in new ones. Students

react well to having some familiar aspects of the lesson while also staying engaged by

incorporating new activities.

● Having students play little solos quickly at the end of class seems to excite them. As long

as we do the solos quickly, the students do not get bored and they usually seem excited to

show off the skill that we talked about in class that day.