Update on Teaching & Apichima Bingo 1

This fall I have continued to teach my two homeschooling students and have started to teach their 6 year old sister as well.  In addition to this I have started teaching two more groups.  

The first new group that I am teaching are 3 members of St. Willibrod's Antiochian Church in Holland, Mi.  One of them has lots of chanting experience and reads western notation fluently and the other two have some music/foreign language background but not much experience chanting.  We have had four lessons so far over Google Hangouts.  They are moving through the materials much faster than my young students so at some point I will probably have trouble keeping up!  Teaching over Hangouts isn't optimal but we are making it work.    

The other new group is a group of kids at my church.  They range from age 6-13ish and at our first class there were 10 kids.  The plan is to meet once a month.  At our first class I taught them the scale degrees with the Ni Pa Vou cards (and we played Fine) and they learned the Greek letters by playing Fat Snake.  They were in two groups for these two games and then we all came together and did the first 15 phrases of the Parallage Phrases.  The younger/new students stopped at phrase 10 and watched the older/experienced students do the rest.  They did really well on the phrases and having 10 kids all at once was not any harder than having two!    

I have also started sending out materials to chanters that will be testing the materials with their students.  That has been a lot more work than I thought it would be (but isn't everything).      

The front and back of the Apichima Bingo 1 cards- They are 8" x 10".

One of my goals with my new students this fall is to have them start learning the Apichimas from the first lesson.  It is really important that students start this early so that they gain a solid understanding of how each mode relates to the others.  Most beginning chanters struggle in services when they have to switch modes.  My goal is that my students can do this easily--first in sticheraric melodies and then heirmologic.    

My adult students have learned apichimas for Modes 1,3, and Plagal 4.  For mode 1 they know it as "Ni, Pa, Pa" and "Ah-na-nes" but for Modes 3 and Plagal 4 they only know them as "Ni, Ga, Ga" and "Ni, Pa, Vou, Ni, Ni".  This week was their first week with Mode 3 and Plagal 4 so next week I will probably teach them the Greek that goes with it.  We played a game called Play or Pass going through those 3 apichimas and they did really well.  

I haven't explained to them that these are only some of the Sticheraric Apichimas yet:)  But they can tell you what an ison, oligon, apostrophos, kentema, elaphron, petaste, and kentemata are!  I think a person can only learn so much Greek at a time.   I will probably teach them Mode 4 Legatos apichima and them we will start testing out my newest material---Apichima Bingo.  This is the very first draft of this material so we'll see what needs to be changed.