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Breaking it down allows you to make kids comfortable, give them confidence, and, most importantly, not practice mistakes.

intellectualizing, listening, and blowing

Intellectualizing means thoroughly understanding the constructs of music –rhythmically, melodically, idiomatically, and tonally – before attempting the final product.

Improvisation was an element of the old National Standards of Music (one of the standards that was often left unmet).

 The new standards

still include improvisation

Irrespective of the pedagogical implications of the more recent studies of practice behavior, making practice assignments in terms of time practiced instead of goals accomplished remains one of the most curious and stubbornly persistent traditions in music pedagogy

In fact, informal reviews of private teachers' instructions for practice reveal that teachers commonly assign only what to practice and how long to practice, with little attention given to specific proximal goals to be accomplished each day.

This is in stark contrast to assignments in many academic disciplines in school, where students are given sets of problems to solve, chapters to read, or essays to write, and the time devoted to homework is determined by the time required to complete the problems, read the chapters, or compose the essays. It seems readily accepted in other disciplines by teachers and students alike that all students will not devote the same amount of time to assignments, because individual learners work at different rates and different learners will not require the same amount of time to complete each assignment. How long one works depends on how long it takes to accomplish the assigned goals.