Starting a ukulele club, what to do at meetings?

needmorecowbell

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Im starting a ukulele club at school, and I will be getting it approved once I have a teacher to sponsor it and enough people who want to join. I was going to plan it so that you didnt need to know uke to join, you could come for free and learn something regardless. It would be once a week for an hour or so. What could we do in that time? Thanks!
 
You could start by everyone introducing themselves, take care of any business, and then play. You could take 10 minutes to talk and then maybe do 10 minutes of something about the ukulele (how to change strings, proper hand position, whatever), then use the rest of the time to play. Allow about 5 minutes at the end for folks to get their stuff put up. That's still a lot of playing time, so maybe you could have a set list of songs to play, then take some requests from the group. It would be awesome if you had a few ukes people could borrow during the meetings.
 
After the first few weeks, invite members to sign up to lead a song at the next meeting. You could try introducing a couple of chords at each meeting, then playing songs with those chords. Basically, anything you can show in 5 minutes, get people to try for 5 minutes, then apply in a song is likely to work.
 
Thanks everyone, just an update, i am now working on finding a teacher for this club. Its a little harder than I expected, but nothing I can't work with. The easiest part was seeing if members would join. Tons of people love the ukulele, and want to learn it! Long live the uke!
 
What has been good for the Normal Ukulele Group is to introduce new songs every meeting and if they go well, and/or people want to play them again, add them to your group "book"
also make the book available to everyone.
IF you want the normal Uke groups book then PM me and I will get you access to help you get started.
I have also found that being serious or a perfectionist really turns people off too.
Good luck.
 
We have a very small club. Uke isn't very popular here. We've copied from other clubs for our agenda. The main thing we do is play. We use Jim Beloff's daily uke books. I think they are around $17. For us it's a lot easier than asking people to bring songs and to make copies--especially with ink being so expensive. Each person selects 2 songs and we go around a circle to take turns. We don't have a sharing time but people bring things to share sometimes. I show parts of dvds or youtubes for 10-15 minutes. Some people would be happy with just that, but I think group playing is the most fun part of the meeting. We meet once a month for about an hour and a half. No dues, no rules, no minutes, no officers,---just fun. YMMV
 
what age are your students? I am assuming they are either HS or MS or Elementary since you need a teacher. I've ran a school uke club for some time and this year is the first year I'm doing it with older students. In my experience it is better to have the STs by their own ukes. I discovered that if they invest in the instrument they take a little more pride in it.

As far as an agenda...I'd spend the first few classes going over the basics. You'd be surprised how little some folks know. Also understand that there will be STs there just for the social aspect. They will have no interest in learning uke. They just want to learn about that boy/girl that they are interested in. I've kicked those kids out. I also kicked kids out that didn't make an effort to get a uke. I had ukes available for the STs that couldn't afford one, but they had to earn it (I asked them to write me a letter why they should get one and I also checked with their teacher and parents to make sure their was a financial burden there).

Once we went over the basics I taught them some basic chords...G, C, D, Am, F, G7 and then we learned some basic songs that were simply one to two chords. I also allowed them to have a few minutes to just play whatever noise they wanted to (remember I was working with elementary kids grades 3-5).
The second year I did the club I bought the Ralph Shaw DVD and we followed it along. At the end of the second year I had 5 STs perform in the school talent show.

Make it fun. That is the key.
 
It's a good idea to print out 4 or 5 songs for each session, with lyrics and chords in tablature....we do that for all our jammers, most are beginners....
 
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