Workshop Review for Wendy Rae - Learning to Play, Playing to Learn: Experiencing Recorder Activities Through the Learning Stages

Thanks to Tristan for writing up a review of our last workshop:  Learning to Play, Playing to Learn: Experiencing Recorder Activities Through the Learning Stages:

Wendy Rae came up from Calgary present: Experiencing Recorder Activities Through the Learning Stages on Saturday, February 8th, 2014 at Westboro school in Sherwood Park.  She is a master at getting young children to first feel confident playing and then having them create and improvise on recorder. Wendy shared her insight into this learning process by taking us through the learning stages with pieces all on the theme of “snow.”  

Wendy prefers to begin with the notes A and C so that the children feel successful in playing soh-mi melodies and ostinati immediately. We created, as the children would, at all varying levels: from creating movement phrases, to cinquains, to improvising melodies on various pentatonic scales.

Wendy showed us that recorders can be played while moving and some other little tricks to get the students playing with good technique and proper posture. For example, by going down to the F to include dohearly on, students coordinate using two hands from the beginning.

Wendy left us with excellent material that we can walk with right into a classroom. A favourite that we will be using right away is the Olympic fanfare on recorder with winter sport speech ostinati that could be extended or simplified for any skill level.
 
Thank you Wendy for sharing with us those things that you have learned from many years of experience!

By: Tristan Wilde