Notes - First Lesson with Second student

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My second student is actually a friend of mine that wants use the method. She currently does not have a guitar but thought our first lesson was very fun. She already has some skills and a small knowledge base with chords and strumming. To take advantage of this I developed the second and third strumming pattern exercises with her. Since she already knew the beginner chords I teach everyone we are moving on to much more challenging open chords like Fmaj and Bmaj. This proved to be a challenge. We ended up only focusing on the Fmaj the whole time but by the end of the lesson I had her playing it cleanly. I developed a way to approach these types of chords.

For the Fmaj chord it was taxing on her hand to hold the whole chord and play it cleanly. It was also impairing her ability to learn where her fingers should be to play cleanly. Her hardest challenge was playing the 1st and 2nd strings cleanly as these are held down by finger 1 at the same time. So I decided to focus on just those. I had her hold the 1st and 2nd strings with finger 1 and play each until they were clean. Once she had a grasp with how the finger should be positioned to be able to do this we added finger 2 on the 2nd fret of the 3rd string. I then had her practice playing those three strings cleanly. At first she ran into problems but was soon able to readjust and get her hand positioned to play all three clean consistently. At this point I had her add finger 3 on the 3rd fret of the 4th string. What I thought would affect her playing the chord actually did the opposite. She was able to play the chord cleanly with the added note. This led me to understand the most difficult aspect of the open Fmaj chord is holding string 1 and 2 down with the same finger. Once that is perfected adding the rest of the notes for the chord are far less difficult.