Photoshop Friday

The books are here!

My studio books have arrived! At 10:00 this morning those hefty boxes of brand new books looked so exciting to me. It's like Christmas! Of course many of them are new to me this year, so I am eager to start practicing too!

Now it is 5:54 pm and I am totally exhausted. It takes hours to sort through everything, create invoices and prepare for that first day of teaching.

A big thanks to Carol at Long and McQuade who works so hard this time of year to help teachers and students get off to a great start. Almost everything arrived on time, except for my books from Kjos. Otherwise, I've got an eclectic selection of musical goodies for my students.

I'm looking forward to sharing some of my new favorite books...maybe on Monday.

Super Secret Blog Pages

Did you know you can have super secret pages on your blog? These are pages that don't appear on the main navigation tabs. I just started a special hidden page for my students (well, it's not so secret now is it?).

I want to encourage my students to listen and explore more music this year. So I plan to take five minutes of each lesson for a listening assignment. We'll have a different theme each month and weekly updates with new videos and content.

I have given each student a Listening Journal for their binders and they will keep track of all the new music they have discovered throughout the year.

I puzzled with how to deliver the content...lap books would be fun, Keynote would be good too. But in the end I decided to use the super secret blog page, where I can easily add images and video links. We'll access it with my iPad during lesson time and I hope students will be motivated to go home and visit the page again, maybe taking time to explore a little further.

If you look way over at my sidebar on the right, you will see a new button called Look Listen Learn. Just click it and you'll be taken to my listening page.

September is going to be Crazy Combo month. So let's get this project rolling with that amazing new video from The Piano Guys... you know the one I'm talking about. Click here to hop on over to Look Listen Learn.