Learning Twinkle, Twinkle

Author: Elena Rang

A very good day on our Vivaldi Team was when I tried to take a different approach to teaching one of my 6-year-old violin students. Currently we are helping the students learn to play the tune Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on the violin, but often I realize that they just wait for instructions instead of trying to experiment with learning it on their own, even though it is a song they actually know very well. On this particular day, I asked my student if she wanted to be the teacher and tell me how the song goes. It was adorable how honored she felt and how proud her voice sounded when she told me to put the bow on the "A" string, then to the "E" string, then instructed me to put my first finger down and so on.

This different approach and method of teaching helped her and other students enormously to think by themselves instead of waiting for my instructions.