Practicing
A comment to band students about practicing. Practice is the homework for our class. We encourage students to make a plan of exactly what needs to be practiced for the week. Plan a minimum of 5 short practice sessions a week and then execute the plan. Each practice session should include warm-ups ( like scales and long tones, or rolls), work on lesson or sectional material and band music. Practice should involve using strategies for making the music better. Strategies would include the three step process, breaking down individual measures or sections of music into small parts and also starting a passage at a slow tempo and gradually speeding up the tempo. When a student is done with a practice session and putting their instrument away, the student should be able to think back on a goal for that session that was attained. They should be able to say that the passage of music, run of notes or exercise/etude got better.
Also a note specifically for parents of 6th graders:
The practice reports are to be done only once a week describing one of their practice sessions. Some practice reports are coming in without a date. We can’t give credit to that report since we don’t know what week to assign that report to. We also are getting multiple reports for the same week. We cannot give credit to more than one report during a particular week. It is not a report for each session the student does. The student should just pick one session of many sessions during a week to report about.