Explorations in Teaching

Practice Spinners

Pretend Bow - Pre-Twinkle - Version 2.0

To make this bow I bougth a bunch of wooden dowels and sawed them down to me 20" each. I also bought one square down and sawed smaller peices, about 1.25" (give or take). After sanding all the pieces, I used wood glue to glue the frog piece to the stick and let that dry for 24 hours. I then used the KwikWood epoxy glue to fill in the cracks between the round stick and the square shaped piece fo the "frog". Laslty, I painted the bows, and also painted different colors for where the students' fingers will go. Red is where thier middle finger might lie. The blak dot is where their thumb will rest. And the green line is where their pinky will sit. I anticipate using these bows for their earliest of violin learners who will practice the different Twinkle rhythms while bowing on their shoulders.

Canons and Rounds in DM, Dm, GM, & Gm

I collected these rounds from the Feieraband Canons & Rounds book and changed some keys and adapted them for use with early string learners  that have likely sung these same songs in their general music classes. They can be used in private lessons or with string ensembles as an orchestra warm-up or even as a concert piece if repeated a few times.

"Moon Over the Ruined Castle" & "Wake Up, Littles Sparrow" by Ella Jenkins

"Allegro", by Shinichi Suzuki, from Suzuki Cello Book 1 - Illustrated video with "Wake up, Wake up" Lyrics

"Hey There Mousy" - Pre-Twinkle Suzuki Song and Video

Humoresque - Suzuki Book 3 - Story Video

Here are the measurements for the foam cello that I made, as well as a printable outline! The lower bout of the cello that I made is about 1/2" smaller than the printable outline. At the time, I had to make the lower bout a bit smaller due to the shape of the foam that I happened to have, but actually the smaller lower bout worked well for my niece. I would suggest sizing the cello to fit your student/child, and going a little bit smaller than the outline as needed. I would also size the length of the fingerboard to fit as well.

Next, I did a lot of sawing, sanding, and carving to figure out a good size and shape of the fingerboard and bow.

After getting a rough shape of the fingerboard, I tried to carve out the shape of a bow using the remainder of the wood. The wood was a little tricky to work with and I ended up carving off too much at the tip of the bow, but it still worked well! I tied and pieced of string round it to make "horse hair". I ended up using plaster of Paris and tacky glue to make the string extra secure. I cut a pencil grip and added that as a bow grip.

I glued fabric to the foam with a mixture of tacky glue (and whatever glue I could find), and also glued to fingerboard to the the foam. I added the finishing touches of paint and designs to the bow too. I put hearts on the side of the bow, thinking I could say to my niece, "make sure you can see the hearts", and flowers on the front so I could say "can you show me the flowers?". I was hoping this would help her hold it with the correct angle. I also added a snowman sewing decal with hot glue, because my niece loves snowmen. I was hoping the would help her make up and down bows (if I said "pull the snowman this way" and "push the snowman that way"). For the endpin I found an antenna in my garage that had come form a discarded radio. I hot glued the endpin in. It stuck out a bit permanently, but when it adjusted its size it actually stayed in place.

I made strings out of yarn that happened to be multi-colored. I was hoping to say to my niece, "can you put your fingers on the red string?". I weaved the string through rubber bands that I had placed at the top and bottom of the fingerboard. My mom ended up making a purple drawstring bag/case, and we practiced taking it out and putting it away.

My niece loved her foam cello! She wanted to play it as soon as she woke up (as you can see, she did not even take off her bonnet lol!) At first she was too shy to play it, and wanted her bunny rabbit to play it while she sat in the audience and clapped. Then, when I was looking she picked it up and told me she wanted to play, and started to pretend play as I sang Frere Jacques. Then, without me prompting, she started singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and played it for her baby sister.

During my first year of teaching, I worked in a school which had a very limited budget for a strings/orchestra program. Needless to say I had to improvise in order to have a functional program with as little hiccups as possible. One of the issues that I faced was that I needed cello racks to store the cellos. The cello racks I saw online were priced at at least $500. That wasn't going to work! So I decided to attempt to design and make my own out of PVC pipe. I ended up spending about $50 of my own, but the end result was the handiest piece of equipment in my classroom, and totally worth it.

After visually gaging and experimenting, I sawed out all the pieces of PVC and put them together without glue first to confirm that my design would work. Finally, I glued the PVC together (this part was a bit tedious as I made a few mistakes and had to go back and forth to the store to purchase new PVC connecting parts a few times.) 

After fitting the cello, I ended up going back to the store to purchase some pipe wrap insulation to let the cello rest on a softer surface. I cut up smaller sections of this and also put these where the neck rests on the cello rack. However, these ended up making the cello rest not as slanted as I wanted and ended up coming off anyways when my students used them (I kept forgetting to glue them.) Lastly, I spray painted the PVC just because. 

The end result worked out really well for my classroom and it only cost me about $50.. The only disclaimer I would give with this design is that if you have cellos with very wide bodies, then three 4/4 size cellos will fit very snug on this rack. I used my 4/4 size cello to measure and make the rack (picture in the first four photos.) However, I ended up utilizing the rack to store my students' 3/4 size cellos simply because I had exactly three 3/4 size cellos that were being used, and to keep them all in the same place. (Some of my students still had trouble distinguishing between 3/4 size and 4/4 size cellos.)

I ended up making another cello rack for my 4/4 size cellos with slightly larger measurements. I also used these in my classroom all the time. However, I found that once I extended the length of the measurements of the longest PVC pieces that went horizontally, the PVC dipped down a little bit and wasn't perfectly straight. It still worked very well, but it didn't seem as sturdy. If I were to make this again I would probably a pair or two of extra feet on the bottom to support the weight of three or four full size cellos. (I will add that a few of my students' cellos were exceptionally heavy.) I ended up storing the bows for these in extra empty bass bow cases. Next time, I would probably add a hook behind where each cello rested to store the bows.