Back to School 2020: More resources coming your way!

It is an unprecedented time in our world’s history, with COVID-19 shutting down schools last spring and creating some difficult decisions for school adminstrators this fall. Many schools are going back to school virtually and will be making plans to bring students back face to face when conditions allow. Some schools are going face to face and are being forced to quarantine teachers and students.

In my situation in Fulton County Schools, I will be starting the year 100 percent remotely, teaching from my school building. I am very happy with this decision, as our leadership made intelligent decisions based upon numbers and trends in our area.

While at school I am spending my day in synchronous (live) lessons in Microsoft Teams (a district mandate) and am taking time to create asynchronous (self-guided and recorded) instruction. This scheudule has afforded me some extra time (and the need!) to create pedagogical materials for my students and yours!

Keep an eye out for LOTS of resources this fall!

To start out the school year, I recorded an episode of The Orchestra Teacher Podcast and had a wonderful interview with my friend and colleague, Ms. Shawn Morton, orchestra director at Duluth High School in the Gwinnett County Public Schools. You can listen to the episode here:

In addition, I have already created several YouTube videos for my students. The first one deals with learning to use the pegs to tune violin, viola, and cello:

Next, I created a video for my original tuning sequence, but have updated it a bit to include a perfect fifth that will allow students to better hear the tuning note and provide them with a better frame of reference when listening and tuning.

You can keep up with all of the latest videos by subscribing and enabling notifications on The Orchestra Teacher YouTube channel.

I wish you all the best of luck as you prepare for returning to school this fall. It will be more challenging than ever, but, hopefully, with the right resources we can motivate our students to continue to play on their and prepare for returning face to face.

More to come… stay tuned!