Heat, Humidity, Looking to the New Year

As some 4th to 6th graders may have reported, I have had to spend a great deal of class time in the past 2 weeks tuning instruments with pegs that refuse to stay put. The unusually cold and dry weather made the heaters at school have to work extra hard, which made the air unusually dry. On many instruments, the pegs and peg-boxes contracted at different rates, and the pegs would no longer stick. If we lived in Colorado or Minnesota, the instruments would probably adjust (or a luthier would adjust the pegs). While I encourage students to avoid leaving an instrument in a cold (or hot) car or the like, some of the most difficult to tune instruments were ones that never left the 4th or 6th grade classroom--it was the dryness rather than the coldness that was the most problematic.

With the return of rain and warmer weather, the instruments seem to be staying in tune much better, and I at least am hoping for damp weather the rest of the winter (or if it is cold and dry, may we have snow with it).

Below are notes looking ahead to the New Year and our assembly on January 28 (at which grades 4 to 8 will all perform on instruments).

4th Grade Your student should bring Smart Violin (and her or his instrument) on our first Thursday back after the break. We will return to the initial exercises and move quickly through the initial pages--both as a review and an introduction to note reading (n.b. many students have learned note reading with private teachers already), with the intention of moving to and beyond Dana the Manatee in the first few classes. I will set our assembly program after our first few classes.

If you cannot locate your student's copy of Smart Violin, you may buy another copy at smartviolin.com

5th & 6th Grade Students might benefit from previewing the following from Strings Extraordinaire: Chorale (8), Processional from Water Music (9), Gavotte in D (11), and King William's March (12). We will play these 4 pieces when we return, and some of them will be on our January 28 program.

7th & 8th Grade For the January 28 assembly, we will likely accompany 4th to 6th grades for their performances. We will also accompany at least one class for a song they will sing from the Spanish curriculum. It is possible we will collaborate with the middle school choir for a song.

I encourage students to look through Rise Up Singing over the break, to find songs that appeal to them, practice them, and bring them back to our group in the New Year. We should be able to play the following chords: C, A, G, E, D, Am, Em, Dm, F, Bm, B7. Many students can also play A7, D7, C7, G7, and E7.

One way to practice switching chords is to take a simple song such as "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and transpose it into different keys:

DDAD is the progression we have learned. Students should also try

CCGC
AAEA
GGDG
FFCF
EEB7E

and

DDA7D
CCG7C
AAE7A
GGD7G
FFC7F

I have done this in individual lessons I have given this week and will present this idea to the group on Monday.

With Warmth and Light,

William Dolde