Summer Music Programming and resource highlight

Planning for summer programs is always interesting because you don’t really know what to expect. Some of the assumptions I make are:

You know you’ll be working with new students.
You don’t know who their teachers are or what their progression is through certain pedagogy points.
Some students may take private lessons.
Some students may only learn through the orchestra classroom.
You don’t know what note range students know or are comfortable with.

So how are you supposed to lesson plan for all of these variables when you’re only throwing these students together for a five day camp?

I’ve had some time over the years at the Shepherd Community Music Program for our Junior Strings summer camp to test a couple ideas out! Some details to know about my string orchestra camp include it happens one week each summer for three hours a day. Our final day of camp we share a little performance with the friends and family to share what we’ve learned. While we include note reading as a skill students should have before registering, it is common for students to attend with little to no note reading experience. In terms of Suzuki repertoire, students who enroll tend to play anywhere from an early book 1 through early book 3 level.

That’s a pretty big gap!

In the last few years I’ve settled on a few target concepts for us to work on through this camp. My goal is to give each students something new and different than they might receive in their classroom or private lessons, whether that be a new skill, genre of music or something else. This year I gave students a list of free resources available to them online to help them with tuning, improvisation, writing music and more. (You can check that out in my shop here as a free download!)

Here’s some of my favorite music skills to go over in summer camp!

Tuning

What an important skill, right? And yet it can feel daunting to teach to students when you can’t be with them each day. I often wish I could be with students a few days in a row to offer pointers and encouragement as they’re learning this skill. Personally I am always nervous about a parents’ response to the inevitable first broken string, too. While I emphasize that breaking a string every now and then is part of the learning process, the financial strain can be a lot for some parents to deal with.

I really enjoyed working on tuning this summer by sharing the free website, Tuner.ninja with my students and displaying it on a projector for the whole class. It made for an interactive exercise where the students could learn and help each other all week, too. The entire group was responsible for helping the student who was currently tuning by pointing up if the string was flat, pointing down if the string was sharp and straight across if it was in tune. This was an easy way for me to check in and see which students were engaged with class and understand what we were working on, too!

Knowing that I was seeing these students just a few weeks after school let out, with the rest of the summer stretched out in front of them, I wanted them to be able to tune their own instruments and hopefully continue making music until their orchestra classes resumed in the fall!

Listening skills

Another activity that was a lot of fun to do together was listening to a variety of music in class! Together we listened to different violinists, violists and cellists playing some standard repertoire from a range of time periods. As a group we identified these details together in a class discussion:

Song Name:

Composer:

Performer:

Instruments Used:

Description (Tempo, Timbre, Mood, Dynamic Range, etc.):

For some students this seemed to be the first time they really connected how a piece can be performed by multiple people and a performer is not necessarily the composer. This exercise was a really great way to expand our music vocabulary. We could even highlight the techniques we were working on during our rehearsal times through a real life examples, too! I tried to keep it fun by letting students pick the time period and solo instrument for the day. Given that we held camp on West Virginia Day, we even watched a live performance of John Denver’s “Country Roads”, which led to a great discussion about the arrangement and instruments involved in the performance versus the recorded version most of the students were used to!

Improvisation

Using improvisation in summer camp is nothing new to me (Check out the blog post from summer camp in 2019 here for a structured lesson plan!), and we did it again this year. While I did not use the game I outlined in the lesson plan in that previous post, we did work on the pentatonic scale together! This year I shared how easy it is to find backing tracks and play around with the pentatonic scale over time a variety of styles. The kids seemed to favor this Emotional Driving Piano Track, but we also did tracks in an acoustic pop guitar style, rock style, and more! It was fun to see the students develop preferences for different sounds and for our final concert two students volunteered to solo in front of the audience using the pentatonic scale. They were beaming as they played for everyone and I hope that feeling stays with them for a long time!

Music Notation & Free Music software

This summer I was able to share and demonstrate the free music notation software MuseScore with my students and they were AMAZED. As part of our pentatonic scale discussion we started a new score so that all instruments in the class could see a pentatonic scale written out after we had tried it out and played it together a few times! This was such a cool way to show what the program could do, let students hear the play back and made it easier for students to copy down the scale on their own staff paper to take home and practice. For my private students I try to give plenty of opportunity to practice writing music notes, clefs, time signatures and so on, but several students in camp said this was the first time they’d done it! So whether they want to try their hand at writing music out by hand or using a program like MuseScore, I feel these students are prepared to sit down and create a written record of some music.

Note reading

Last but not least, we did rehearse some music! One of my favorite new resources I’ve found this year is the website for Mainstream Music, https://www.mainly4strings.co.uk/. I have been able to find so much music for my (small, underfunded, community) beginner strings ensemble this year and I am SO glad I remembered to check in with their library when lesson planning for the summer camp! Originally I had hoped to do a piece called “Seaside Rock”, but the night before camp I realized I wanted to pick one more piece. Something the students might recognize, something that would be fun and yet have one really easy violin part, just in case some students really were struggling with note reading.

I found the perfect piece in “Easy Kanon”, an arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon in D by Peter Martin.

This was such a lucky find and ended up being our primary piece for the week! It had an Easy Violin part consisting just of open D, open A and B on the A String that was perfect for the students who were still working on their note reading skills. Students who were further along at the end of Suzuki book 1 were thrilled to recognize this popular tune and the cellists were excited to have such a famous bass line to work on! It was just right for this group and I’d highly recommend other teachers check it out for similar groups with a variety of playing abilities and a short time to rehearse together.

I can’t wait to keep using and expanding on these areas in future summer camps for string players!

I hope you find this to be a helpful place to start if you are looking to plan your own summer music program! If you’ve done a similar program, I’d love to hear what topics and skills you focus on when you’re with new students for a short period of time, too. We all want to make it a special experience for the young musician, so it’s important to have a short list of skills we can help them achieve in that time.

Happy teaching!

Planning a Summer Strings Camp