Holding the instrument!
Off we go! So much more information I want to post soon but for now, as your students are practicing, you can gently remind them of some habits we want to form. The violin is hard from an ergonomic standpoint so this is what we want to encourage and support:
That the violin is enough to the left so it’s at least to the corner of the room if you’re facing a wall straight on. This helps it stay near flat as well.
That the violin is high on the shoulder, coming near or onto where the seam on the shoulder of a shirt if it has one
At the same time those two things are true we also try to get the chin to find a comfortable spot on the chin rest (it doesn’t have to touch it in any particular way or be fully on it, that is the end of the chin can hang off it…I was once in a workshop where the instructor said we should call it a jaw hook rather than a chin rest)
And we try to stay relatively relaxed and balanced in our bodies, as we talked about a lot in class ie balanced on both feet, standing straight and tall but not full of tension either. (This is an ideal to work toward, and so are the rest of the form and technique guidelines.)
For the left hand we want to make a large spiral shape and turn the hand inward toward the strings, not collapsing the wrist up to the fingerboard. We check that the thumb is not too low or high in relation to the strings and that the index finger touches the violin and the X spot just above the 3rd wrinkle.
Students can practice two pieces thus far:
The Ant Song:
Each each each and every
Ant ant ant digs the
Dirt dirt dirt under the
Ground ground ground
(Playing each string 4 times from E to G, with the lyrics helping us learn what letter each string is.)
Shake Little Tree
Shake shake little tree
Silver and gold may cover me
This uses the A string and first finger for the starting note B. We did this very quickly but the students can probably sound this out with practice if at first they don’t quite have it. They have to know how to play B with first finger and A by lifting it up (which we call open string).