Thank you for coming to the “Nurturing Creativity and Inspiration” workshop today at Senseney! I really appreciate you taking the time to come and I hope you went away with something useful.
I wanted to share more details about a few things that I mentioned:
MUSIC
If you would like to view the music discussed today, please click on the Music Tab.
INSPIRATION
You can find the complete text of the card I read to you about passion (and inspiration) here.
FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS
When I spoke about “Be Thou My Vision” from Easy Hymn Solos Book 2, I mentioned that I try to find just the right words to help a student use imagery in this piece. The problem area for some students is that they like to add pedal to even the A section. But, I find that it’s been effective if I tell the student that “this section should be lonely…[pause for the effect]…so lonely that you make me want to cry. And then [pause], the B section will be like a wonderfully warm hug after the lonely section.”
The point is that I try to be deliberate in what words I use. But, I find that I get stuck in a vocabulary rut very easily. On this page, you will find a link to a great list of adjectives that you can use to be more descriptive in your teaching.
COMMUNITY
“Be a part of a community” was one of the suggestions given for nurturing creativity. Here are some suggested online communities for piano teachers.
- ComposeCreate® on Facebook– If you are on Facebook, you can choose to “like” the ComposeCreate® page in order to get updates and participate in discussions. Of course, you can also comment on any of the posts directly on this blog, but the FB page will alert you when there is a new post. Hal Leonard/Educational Piano is also on Facebook.
- Email Newsletter-If you didn’t check the box on your door prize form today, you can still sign up to receive the newsletter which comes every 2-3 weeks. Simply type your email address into the “Sign up for the Newsletter” box on the right side of this page. To see what kinds of articles are on this blog, simple go to the Home tab.
- Pianoteaching.com-This is the Faber’s online piano teaching forum. Here you can post questions or just read all of the wonderfully creative answers that teachers give to others’ questions. This forum is not an email forum, so it does not come directly to your email inbox. You can simply read it online, but you must login before you can post or answer questions. Even if you don’t join, this is fabulous website to visit often (as in every day)!
- Yahoo Piano Teachers – This is a forum that you can read online or have the messages delivered to your email inbox individually or in a bulk summary.
- Pno-Ped-l– This is an email forum only. You can post questions or just read others questions and answers by subscribing. Each question and answer will come to your email inbox, so there may be days when you have a lot of emails and days when you only have a few. Within Microsoft Outlook, I designate that all of the messages from this address (the pno-ped address) go to a separate email inbox so that I am not overwhelmed and I can stay organized in my email correspondence.
MORE ON CREATIVITY and INSPIRATION
You can explore the Creativity and Inspiration categories on this site. There is a variety of posts about each of these topics, so scroll down after clicking on the hyperlink and visit older pages as well. You should be able to find something that will interest you. I want to point out a few post that I think will be especially useful:
