With a huge influx of new students and students returning after the summer, I discovered that the system of keeping track of which songs each student was working on was going to need to change. What I had been doing was writing the student's name and the date they started working on each piece in my copy of the method book. This worked fine until I saw that I was running out of blank space in some of my books, and was struggling to find who I was looking for. Beyond that, I couldn't make notes of what other skills we worked on and what activities we did. I couldn't record what specifically they needed to work on if I reassigned a piece. Beyond that, when I used my book to point out a spot in a song, the student could see the names of everyone who had worked on that song in the last few months and it was distracting to say the least.
So, for the fall semester, I started using a notebook (journal book, more specifically) and writing the date in the middle of the page and then the student's name on the left and what their assignment is as well as what we worked on during the lesson. I keep it short and sweet, like "Piece One. Piece Two. Notes on the Staff. Pentascales C and G." I'm not writing a lot during the lesson, but I know what we did and what they are supposed to practice. I'll put a note next to the piece what specific things I said to focus on. For example, hold the dotted half notes (using the symbol) and dynamics. I may also write to review a certain thing the next week. So far, this is working pretty well, and as long I have my notebook, I have all the info I need to plan the next lesson, and confidently say we talked about about this last week :).
That's what is working for me right now. Comment below if you have a different system that works for you.
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