Children’s Songs for Beginner Cellists – Teacher’s Edition

Description

Children’s Songs for Beginning Cellists is a method that is designed to be accessible to neurodiverse and neurotypical learners alike. A lot of care has been taken to ensure that the music is formatted so that it is clean and clear for all to read.

The Teacher’s Edition is written with cello teachers in mind, but could also be useful to parents of students as well as adult learners. It has all the “answers” to the student books as well as advice and suggestions for teaching the material.

This book is split into three parts, one for each book in the method:

• Book 1 teaches the fundamentals like cello posture, bow hold, and rhythm
• Book 2 teaches pentatonic songs with pitches Do, Re, Mi, and So
• Book 3 teaches diatonic songs with pitches in one octave.

Some students need to start with book 1 (especially those who need help with coordination, commonly ages 4-6), others can begin with book 2 (commonly ages 7+). A lot of focus is put on listening, to help develop students’ ears right from the beginning. Because learning by ear can be quite difficult for some, topics are introduced slowly with many examples to practice each skill. The goal is to have enough material that by the end of Book 3, students will be well prepared to begin learning other styles of music, though some students may be able to skip some of the material along the way if they find it easy to master.

The method is designed to be flexible to different teaching needs:

• Technique is avoided in the student books so teachers may help students to play in whichever way is best for them.
• Moveable solfège is used in this method to describe pitch and rhythm, but teachers can choose to use other naming conventions with their students in addition to or instead of moveable solfège..
• Books 2 and 3 are entirely in G major on the G and D strings, but teachers can choose to teach any other key in addition to or instead of G major. The listening materials are all in G major, but the student book does not mentioned the key at all.
• Staff notation is not introduced in this method to keep it relevant to students going on to play music that doesn’t require reading staff notation.

A PDF of the book as well as mp3 recordings of the music are included in the download. The PDF is easily read on a tablet or printed on US letter or A4 paper without any need for reformatting.