If anyone really wants to teach a flute, they come with years of experience and knowledge. Still, learning the flute and teaching are different.
Helping people with basics, explaining essential ideas, and fixing mistakes require another level of excellence.
If you are starting to teach flute, then the information we have gathered here will benefit you greatly! You might feel a little disordered to plan lessons.
That’s not uncommon to happen. We might know a lot, but we can find it hard to organize our thoughts on a specific task.
Considering that, you can go over the fundamental aspects of teaching the flute below. No, we are not questioning your skills.
Instead, we will help you tick-mark the basics of the flute that you should teach to people. Overall, this guide will assist you to help with beginning the teaching.
If you are here to learn how to help people with the flute, you can give it a read as well. You might have a little kid, and she might be watching videos online to learn the flute. Still, the right guidance is invaluable. From this article, you will know how to teach your little one the flute basics.
Let’s start with the guide now!
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Making Learners Familiar With The Flute
It’s not something hard for somebody to learn about different parts of the flute. But it would be best if you mentioned or make people aware of primary flute anatomy. Besides, learning about the parts will help you to teach other lessons.
With regards to that, you point out all the parts of the flute and name them. You can talk about the keys as well. Little history won’t hurt. Please provide them with some facts about the prehistoric flute, flutes from different parts of the words, and the classical flute we use now.
This way, they are successfully connected with the flute. It’s critical for the learners to feel close to the instrument they are learning.
Showing The Right Way To Hold A Flute
Holding the flute correctly has a huge contribution to playing the flute well. You can show the learners by holding it by yourself and asking them to emulate you.
Emphasize hands, lip position, and head position. Hands are not supposed to be entirely bent in any way. The Head is not supposed to be tilted. Make them well aware of lip formation as well. Learners end up altering lips in the wrong way while playing different notes and scales.
Remind Them To Be Relaxed
Most of the time, flutists hold their bodies tensed. As a result, even if someone possesses great potential of playing flute excellently, they sadly can’t. Given that, you aren’t supposed to move a lot while playing an instrument. But you are allowed to move them freely in the required position.
Overall, don’t be stiff while playing the flute. It will hinder your whole performance. We can draw an instance where- there is a technique named ‘tonguing’ that flutists learn.
It would be best if you moved your tongue in various ways to touch different notes on the flute by tonguing.
The movements of the tongue can get affected by any stiffness in your upper body. So, train the learners to relax as much as they can.
Instructing To Make The Basic Sounds
When you are done talking about flute holding and the essential postures, you need to instruct them to make elementary sounds. Let’s see what you can do to teach learners to make basic sounds.
Making The Embouchure
First, you need to focus on teaching them to form the appropriate embouchure structure. To teach them that, point out how to spread the lips and how the lower lip should be perched right by the mouthing hole.
Also, let them know how they should not form lips. And how the information can change the tunes and stop a flutist from producing the desired sound.
Blowing Into The Flute
You ask them to take only the head joint of the flute. Next, you show them to blow into the flute. Learners tend to miss the embouchure hole while playing a specific note. If you are teaching someone flute, do make sure they are blowing right.
You can see how the upper and lower lips should be structured to make the blow into the flute’s hole. To make initial sounds, ask them to cover the opening of the head joint and make single blows. This way, they can make basic sounds with the flute.
You can instruct them to blow into the flute without covering the flute too. After single blows, you can show them how to make simple tunes as well. Teaching is not an easy job, but you will see your students doing good with the flute once you can teach the basics accurately.
More Things You Need To Keep In Mind While Attempting To Teach Flute
- Mentioning the impact of airspeed on a specific note
- Don’t forget to tell them to practice in front of a mirror.
- Remind learners to go slow with poise
- Practicing until you find the satisfactory sound
- Teaching how to assemble the flute and giving some useful tips to take care of the flute
- Teaching different techniques for tuning the flute
- Discussing the order of the notes
- Talking about how music is written in lines and the spaces of the lines. Take the book’s help and show learners how the notes are residing inside the line, the symbols of the sounds, and how to follow the symbol and the lines to produce tunes.
- Explain to them how notes change.
- To build an understanding of rhythm, talk about the different kinds of beats.
- Be expressive and interactive with your students.
- Always encourage them
- Remember how you took your lessons.
- Help students to find their way of learning the flute.
- Identify to the learners if their ways are wrong, and pat them to start over with double motivation.
On A Final Note
Our guide is not necessarily written for teaching. For real teachers, you could use this guide as an agenda to start teaching. After the basic lessons, you will move on to the other lessons. We have already mentioned at the beginning, preparing for the lesson can be challenging, and that’s perfectly normal. We hope the aspect we have pointed out helps to plan the lessons.
And, for people who are not teachers but want to help someone with the learning process, they can learn basic aspects from the above discussion.
Amazingly, when you learn a specific thing to teach someone, you become a learner and teacher at the same time! Anyway, teachers and learners both can benefit from our guide.