At the beginning of every pre-Twinkle group class I project a music video up on a screen. While the video is playing I greet all of the students in class, tune their violins, and chat with parents. Often I will turn to just sit and watch the video— modeling my attention to the performance as students look to me for social cues.

This video-watching time gives us a bit of flexibility if the parking situation is especially rough and many students are late, or if a child arrives particularly early and is just sitting and waiting for class to start. I like to take advantage of this ripe time to color their environment with rich music.

What is interesting is that I haven’t yet played a single Suzuki piece for them on the screen.

I take for granted they are listening to a reference recording at home and will hear Suzuki pieces as the hour long class unfolds. But I use the video time at the beginning to show students (and parents) that music can be made in SO many ways by SO many different types of people.

I find that no student, yet, has had trouble being attentive during this 5-10 minute period of music watching. I fear it is partly because of their conditioning to screen watch, but mostly representative of their very natural ability to concentrate (in small doses) on intensely beautiful/interesting things.

Here are a few of my favorite selections for class…

https://youtu.be/5LoUm_r7It8
https://youtu.be/XL95vwU92qo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6oSeODGmoQ
https://youtu.be/kNLC8ROAXjI
https://youtu.be/tZ7aYQtIldg
https://youtu.be/hV2-zFh3tAU
https://youtu.be/RGUEFrFcywc
https://youtu.be/MV6Xs-0jmeQ
https://youtu.be/aaVhqvcpbjY
https://youtu.be/cMT053bfQhM
https://youtu.be/Lgj_4xyUt2s
https://youtu.be/3EDGt5l5_20

I hope you can find a way to integrate a few of these videos, or at least the diversity they represent, into you Suzuki classroom.