What makes one activity or song in class catch on like a forest fire while another feels like trying to talk a cat into taking a bath? Several experiences in my teaching life have had me contemplating this mystery lately. This week, I have been experimenting with some ideas I gleaned from Lorrie Heagy, a 2010 Abreu Fellow and 2011 Alaska Teacher of the Year, who came to our school to learn and teach with us this week. At our Tuesday PD meeting, Lorrie demonstrated how five elements--Emotion, Relevance, Curiosity, Patterns, and Movement--make an experience engaging and memorable. These are two stories of success from this week that came from consciously incorporating these five elements.

Case #1: "All Aboard the Bow Express"
In orchestra, we have been working on bow division. My first attempt at teaching this involved marking off tapes on their bow and asking them to match and mirror my actions. This involved some movement and curiosity, and for about thirty seconds I had some of their attention, but when I started trying to drill it it was clear they had not understood the concept. The next day, I drew them a picture of a bus moving down the bow and stopping at each of the four quarters on its way to pick up and drop off passengers between Tip Point and Frog Station. Now there was some emotion and even relevance involved, and I had perhaps twice the amount of attention, at least during the story, but they still weren't really paying attention to bow placement or bow distribution as I had hoped.

On day three, I had my breakthrough! I wrote a song about the "Bow Express," I taught them the motions away from their instrument, then we sang the song with the instruments. The words are:
Chorus:

All aboard the bow express! Hear the whistle blowin'
All aboard the bow express! Listen where we're goin'

Verse:
Goin' Frog to lower quarter (down, up, down)Goin' lower quarter to middle (down, up, down)Goin' middle to upper quarter (down, up, down)Goin' upper quarter to tip (down, up, down)
The tune to the chorus is a little like "Lil Liza Jane," and the (down up down) happens on E string for violin and A for everyone else. Now students are singing about bow division outside of class. I have had requests to do this song again next week. The best part was that that they were all playing in the same part of the bow, not just during the song but even during the song we practiced after it. The song provided the relevance, emotion, and patterns that had been missing. It added movement that they could already do (simple bow waving in the chorus) with movement that was a little more challenging (measuring to each tape). The curiosity came from the desire to learn the song and respond to the changing instructions in the verse.

Case #2: Articulation and "The Ice Cream Song"
Some students are detail people. If you draw their attention to a certain sound and say, "play like this," they will practice until the whole piece sounds like "that." Other students would rather play through the piece than stop and repeat a single bow stroke over and over. As a young student I fell into the latter category, and so I have great empathy for one of my six-year-old students who is of the same ilk. After many weeks of imitating "Mississippi Hot Dog" and focusing on the smooth sixteenths and short eighths, practicing the "hand shake," riding along on the bow, and hopefully listening to the CD, Twinkle was becoming old news, but the "hot dogs" were still not consistently staccato. 

Taking Lorrie's advice, I looked for a way to make this relevant, emotional, patterned, and even pique my student's curiosity. We talked about our favorite flavors of ice cream and how sounds can have different "flavors" as well. Then we made up a system of notation to describe  "smooth vanilla" (four detache sixteenths) and "choc-late" (two staccatto eighths). Her assignment for the week was to write and practice an open-string piece of her own using those two flavors of sounds. 

At the next lesson, she had written two distinct pieces. There was a story behind them, involving staccato criminals and detache police officers. The story had led to a logical formal structure, with certain sections repeated and some recurring ideas. As she performed them, every pair of eighth notes was crisp "choc-late" and every group of sixteenths was smooth vanilla. This student has never been so prepared and so excited in a lesson.

A major challenge in early childhood instrumental instruction is teaching all of these little skills and details that make up a solid technique so that the student owns, understands, and values them. Some students have the patience and context to study and practice a skill for its own sake, and others need context provided for them in different ways. Whatever tools we use, in think that our success in reaching each student depends largely on whether they experience emotion, relevance, curiosity, patterns, and movement in the lesson.