I have recently reached the half-way point for the semester! Yay! This means – among other things – that it is time to revisit the original growth plan that I had written for learning how to play the ukulele.

My goal statement was as follows

“My goal is to become more confident in my ability to play the ukulele. I aim to use a variety of online tools at my disposal (ie. YouTube tutorials) so that I can effectively and confidently play the instrument in my daily life.”

I feel like I am steadily on my way towards meeting this goal, and that I have met my indicators of success for the midterm date. I am starting to learn how to “chop” and “pick” and I believe I am steadily on my way towards becoming confident with this skill and to be able to play some songs from memory for the end of November.

However, I aimed to be able to play “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz and “Hey Soul Sister” by Train by the end of the semster, which I think are a bit too easy. When I was looking at songs for creating my growth plan I looked up “Intermediate Ukulele Songs” and these two came up. But now after actually playing, I think these two songs are too easy for a final goal.  I would like to modify these to try and be able to play “Bear Necessities” by Phil Harris and “Summer of 69” by Bryan Adams (including the finger picking portion of the song).

Every other element of my growth plan I would like to keep the same, as I believe they are all a good balance between being both attainable and ambitious!

-Jess