Aubrey's Second Voice Lesson (finally!!)

So after far too many days of me and her both being sick we FINALLY got another lesson in. I was pretty sure that we were going to basically start all over again so I didn't have any rep prepared for her to pick out. We're going to work with that for the next lesson. We started out with breathing since she has a really tough time grasping the concept of a low breath. She gets it sometimes, but other times she just tries too hard I think. After lip buzzes we started doing some i's because she has a pretty hypofunctional sound. The main focus of our last two lessons was bringing the sound forward and finding the buzz. She seemed like she was kind of lost the whole time when we were doing i's, and she said she didn't like them. I told her to make it sound ugly and gave her examples, but she was just really holding back. I changed the vowel for her so she could do some ah's and o's. I noticed that she also really needs to open her mouth and shape her vowels. I had her go in front of the mirror and told her just to overexaggerate everything. When I explained to her that in the ah vowel she should feel a little dent at the top of her jaw near her ears when she opens enough and then she began to comprehend. We switched back to the i vowel and she still just wasn't getting a forward sound so I kept saying bring it forward. Then the worst thing ever happened. She said she didn't know what I meant and I just kind of drew a blank. I figured either bring the sound forward, or put it in your nose would be plenty easy to understand, but apparently it isn't! I tried making her do really nasal i's but she still was doing them way in the back of her mouth and just coujldn't grasp it. Since I had no other idea what to say to her, I told her that I would just have to do a little bit of reading and research so I could answer her next time. I think I am definetly going to have her do puppy whimpers, which we did a little of but obviously not enough, and we're going to do some sing-ahs so she can feel the resonance. So we switched back to an ah and o vowel just going up and down on a five pattern and I looked at her to see how her vowels were being shaped and I noticed her sternoclineomastoid muscle was moving up and down as she would ascend and descend. So I stopped and asked if her throat hurt and her voice was tired. She said yes. She was forcing up her chest voice. I FIGURED SOMETHING OUT. I was like kind of excited when I made this discovery because I went through/am still fixing the same exact thing. So I explained to her what was going on and we did some sirens so she could feel her head voice. Then I thought this plan was just ingenious but I don't think it really helped...I was having her talk like Mrs.Doubtfire and an opera singer and stuff. She just like tries to do it with her chest or something, I don't know I haven't figured it out yet. I super stressed that her head voice is going to feel super weak and weird, but we're going to keep working with it. Once she can grasp the concept of bringing the sound forward and putting it in her nose I think that will make the head voice a little less scary. She had to sing the Star Spangled Banner that night though and I didn't want to totally mess her up so we stopped with that and just went over some super basic theory stuff just to be sure she knows what to expect when she gets her song.