Teaching flute...help!!

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twiggy208
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Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 3:49 pm

Teaching flute...help!!

Post by twiggy208 »

Hi, I've been playing the flute for nearly 9 years now and have my ABRSM grade 7 exam next week. I turn 16 early next year and my old primary school have asked me to go work at the school part-time in the summer teaching the kids flute. They've currently got 25 8/9 years old children interested in learning and as far as I'm aware, 4 play guitar and 1 plays piano - other than that, none of the other kids read music. I've been told I'll have the kids for 2 hour-long lessons as a big group every week, and a half hour lesson a week with each kid individually, and this will be going on for 6 weeks.

My problem is I have no idea how to start out the teaching process =/ I've helped several of my friends learn to read music before so I feel confident with the theory side of things, but as for the playing - I don't know what order I should teach things...whether to do tunes or scales or what...:S
I don't play piano [but can work my way around it a little by ear] so playing that along with them wont work...

I have also been told that there will be two girls in the group with learning difficulties [autism i think] - any ideas on how to approach teaching here??


Thankyou so much if you can help - I'm well and truly stumped here! :D

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Sforzando
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Post by Sforzando »

If you don't know how to teach, then you probably shouldn't be teaching... at least not with students that are so young. Maybe you shouldn't have taken up the offer if you didn't feel comfortable teaching, yeah? :roll:

But if you're going to do it anyway...
-Start with the basics; play a note on the headjoint, put the instrument together properly, correct hand position (this is a huge point that you may even want to spend the majority of a lesson on), correct posture, etc.
-Teach them a few notes. Maybe 2 or 3 a day. Then you can add on each day, and review a bit as well. You have to make sure they don't just forget what they learned previously.
-You'll want to spend time teaching them to breathe properly.
-And spend some time with tonguing.
-And embouchure.
-Why play along on the piano? You've got a flute, and that's what you're teaching, so play along on that.

There's so much basic information that you have to teach before you move on to tunes or scales. Maybe you should see if you can get someone older and more experienced with teaching to come and help you out. Even if you've been playing for 9 years, teaching is a completely different ballgame, and since you don't know how to teach you'll have a hard time getting anything accomplished with such a large group of such young students.

So yeah... I hope that helped you some.

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bvconway
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Location: Brentwood Bay, B.C., CANADA
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Re: Teaching flute...help!!

Post by bvconway »

Just curious as to how the teaching went. I would have said: "Go for it!". Hope it went well. :wink:

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