Creative Challenges

Our range of guitar lesson plans cover in-depth topics that can last multiple guitar lessons. Some of the lesson plans will take more than an entire lesson to cover properly. While it's important to give your students in-depth tasks to work on, it's also important to give them shorter tasks with a more narrow focus. These 'creative challenges' are short assignments or tests to give your students that can be explained in five minutes or less.

The goals of these creative challenges are:

• to test your student's understanding of a topic/concept/technique
• to uncover any knowledge gaps, flaws in your student's technique or understanding of a concept
• to break away from standard exercises and drills and cover something more interesting
• to work on a skill or concept without it feeling like practice
• to help your student think creatively

These challenges can inspire your students and break the usual routine. Some of the challenges may seem bizarre from the student's point of view, but each one has been carefully tested to ensure they achieve a specific purpose.

It's a good idea to spend time looking at these Creative Challenges as well as more traditional Exercises. Using a combination of both resources will give your student various ways to practice the same skill/concept.

How to print these Creative Challenges

Each creative challenge is split into two separate pages. You will notice that the first page displays the challenge on the top half of the page while the second page displays it on the bottom half of the page. The intention is that you can fit two different creative challenges on a page to mix and match your own combination of challenges for your student.

As an example let's say you have found two suitable challenges and want to give both to your student.

Here's the steps to print two different challenges on the same page:

1. Print of the first page of the first challenge
2. Place the page back into your printer
3. Print the second page of the second challenge

The end result (if you place the paper the right way into the printer during step 2) is you will have the two different challenges on the same page as shown below:

This design will save you paper and will take up less space in your student's book. You can mix and match different challenges specific to each student's needs. In other words these challenges give you great control over what you teach in any lesson.

Improvisation

Teaching your student to think creatively is a challenge for a guitar teacher. It's very hard to come up with exercises to achieve this. These creative challenges will help you get your students to think about improvising in new ways and to 'break out of the box' of conventional thinking.

CI-001 Two note improvising
CI-002 Outside notes
CI-003 Single string

 

Technique

While standard exercises and drills are extremely important in developing a student's technical skills, it's also important to apply techniques in creative ways. These challenges will force your students to think about applying techniques in new ways.

CT-001 Simulated tremolo dips
CT-002 Two hand chord tapping
CT-003 Chords using the thumb

Scale Practice

Practicing scales is important but can be very dull for students. These challenges will break the routine up and allow your students to practice scales in fresh ways.

CS-001 Single note all over the fretboard
CS-002 No adjacent notes
CS-003 Octave tapping

 

 

 

Creative Challenges are important to break your students out of routine and to force them to think outside of the box. In addition to using these Creative Challenges, we recommend you use them in combination to Worksheets, Exercises and Guitar Lesson Plans.