and breathe…

This past week has been hectic, to say the least. The phys. ed. teacher and I put on a full day of activities this past Monday. We did 14 activity stations in the morning and our talent show in the afternoon. I am SO pleased with how the day went. We worked so hard to make it run smoothly and efficiently - and with the help of our awesome staff - it went without a hitch!

I have to say, I am so impressed at the response to the talent show. In previous years, so I’ve heard, students were really not that interested. Well this year they certainly were! We auditioned over 70 acts (in a school of 170 students, that’s pretty great!). We ended up showing about 33 acts that featured over 75 students in our talent show - singing, dancing, stand-up comedy, gymnastics, piano, karate…and so much more! It was such an amazing show of the diverse talent and skill we have in our school!

Now we are down to 6 school days…Can’t believe it! My first year has just melted away. Now I’ve got to think about packing and cleaning….and planning for next year!

update!

It seems as though this first year of teaching is draining away quicker than I drink a cup of coffee in the morning. I can hardly believe that there are only 33 school days left! This past week I had a big moment - my primary and elementary choirs performed in our local music festival. Now, I’ve been a driector before, and have had groups perform before (teen worship teams at church, woodwind ensembles, etc), but this is the first time I’ve ever been Miss Gallant, the choir director.  I was so proud of my choirs! They were extraordinairly well-behaved and respectful, and they sang SO well! We had lost quite a number of rehearsals this winter due to snow storms, but they pulled through! The adjudicator had many compliments, and some excellent constructive advice as well. Overall, a very positive experience!

Now that choir is over, I’m giving my kids a  chance to taste some new musical groups that will be offered through the entire school year next year - recorder, ukulele, and mallett instrument ensembles. I’m going to teach them once a week for the remaining weeks of school, and we’ll perform something simple at the end-of-year school talent show. They are so excited! I am teaching at a very small school (approx. 170 students), and I have over 1/4 of the school population signed up for these extracurricular groups. I am overwhelmed at the positive response!

i’ve been a bad blogger

I’ve been a very selfish blogger over the last few months. I’ve been religiously reading all of the blogs that I follow, but I have not been keeping up with my own blogging! I miss it!

With the school year slowly winding down (can you believe it’s already April!?), there’s still so much left to do! I can’t believe that there are only 3 months left in my first year as a teacher! I’ve still got many things to do, and events to look forward to! I’m preparing my primary and elementary choirs for their music festival next month. We’ll be celebrating “Music Monday” on May 4, 2009 - really excited about that! 

One thing about living in eastern Canada, though, is that we get a LOT of snow. Just last week we got dumped on with over 25 centimeters of snow! We thought that winter was over, but I guess winter just wanted one last blow! We’ve missed 11 school days due to snow and stormy weather this winter and spring, and more often than not, those storm days ended up being on my choir days! Due to my schedule (working alternating days between two schools), and the very active extra-curriculars in both schools, I cannot reschedule a missed choir practice. It’s so frustrating! The kids are so far behind on their music festival material. I think we will make it, and the kids are determined, but it will be interesting, that’s for sure!

The comforting fact is that every other school in my province has had the same thing happen to them. They may have a little more flexibility in terms of rescheduling rehearsals, but the time has still been missed. I may have to call a few after school rehearsals soon, but with sports already taking up most of that time, it’s hard to say if it would be a beneficial thing to do.

snow day reflections

We have yet another snow day - this makes 7 or 8 in the last 6 weeks - so I am doing a little bit of reading and planning. I’ve been reflecting on the past couple of months. It seems as though we haven’t progressed very much, what with winter field trips, winter carnival days, special guests, snow days, etc. I always assumed January and February were the months where you could really catch your drive and get lots done becuase there aren’t any major holidays, but this has not been the case for us! However, here are some of the things that my classes have been working on:

Grade 1: We’ve been learning (after much preparation!) to label tah, ti-ti, and just last week - sah. Where I live, kindergarten is not part of the public school system, so students only recieve their first experience with music in grade 1. In September 2011 kindergarten WILL be in our school system. I’m looking forward to that!

Other things we’ve done:

• Poem & Song (with non-pitched percussion instruments & sign language) for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Read, “Orchestranimals” by Vlasta Van Kampen & listened to audiobook
• The “Elevator Song” - melody direction (high pitches, low pitches, experiencing major scale aurally & visually w/ boomwhackers, playing pitched instruments)
• Sound story - “The Little Boy Named Espimandos”

Grade 2 - We’ve really been focusing on rhythm reading, writing, and performing - and then we added in solfa on top of that. The kids love it! They take such pride in their compositions!  We’ve also been doing a lot of singing & movement games

Grade 3 - We have been working on a sound story - “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat” by Eugene Field. Then, we learned a song based on the story and now we have begun working on an Orff orchestration to accompany the song. We’ve also been learning about the pentatonic scale, and how to set up our xylophones and metallophones into F pentatonic.

Grade 4 - We have been working on an Orff orchestration to “Little Green Bug” from “An Orff Mosaic from Canada” by Lois Birkenshaw-Fleming.  On top of singing this silly song and learning all of the instrument parts that go along with it, we’ve been writing our own silly lyrics based on the original song.

Grade 5 - We began 2009 with a short unit about Franz Liszt. We researched a little about his life, and then we listened to his music. We watched the video, “Liszt’s Rhapsody” - and then we had a lot of fun with Bugs Bunny & Tom and Jerry’s animated versions of the Hungarian Rhapsody.

Then, we reviewed our treble clef note-reading, learned about major scale patterns, and the tonic & dominant notes in C major and F major. We sang, “Chumbara” and “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” and played the I and V chords on Xylophones and keyboards. Now we are moving into playing entire chords with small groups of students.

Grade 6 - We have been working on a “decades of music” unit. We’ve been visiting stations in the music classroom that have been all about music in the 50’s all the way to the music of today. We’ve been to listening stations, watched videos, read articles, played instruments, and visited websites to help us experience each decade.

As I look back, I can see that we have been accomplishing much in the music room - just at a bit of a slower pace than I’d expected. March Break is in 2 weeks - after which our snow days should begin to taper off, and more work can be done! 

tales from the playground…

Last week I was on outdoor duty. I witnessed a little girl in grade 1 chasing a little boy in grade 3. It was funny enough watching him try to evade her, but what made it all that much better was her shouting, “Don’t worry, R.C., I don’t need to catch you. You’re my boyfriend now whether you like it or not!”

Teaching Towards Musical Understanding

Today is the second consecutive “snow day” this week in my area, totalling 4 snow days this month alone.  It’s not surprising - we generally have upwards of 10 snow days in any given winter. The snow days have allowed me many hours in the classroom to plan, organize, and clean. Today, however, I began reading (or rather, re-reading, since this is a text from one of my university courses) “Teaching Towards Musical Understanding” by Amanda Montgomery - a book I mentioned in my last post.

I’ve read through the first three chapters, noting any sections that I found interesting or important. So far nothing is new to me - everything I’ve read is already a part of my teaching. However, it’s good to read it again, and remember why we do certain things, and even realize when we’re not putting enough emphasis or too much emphasis on certain elements.

The following is comprised of bits and pieces of the first three chapters of the book - none of this is my own work, but simply my paraphrase!

In chapter one, Amanda Montgomery defines “musical understanding” in her terms - it is “the ability to think and act musically with personal meaning” (4). This whole text is based around creating opportunities for our students to do just that - think and act musically with personal meaning. This is not something that comes naturally to most children, it has to be taught. To teach musical understanding, we as music educators need to make sure that students are engaged in “active, concrete, authentic experiences”(5) though eight different classroom experiences:

1. Singing
2. Playing Classroom Instruments
3. Improvising
4. Composing
5. Listening
6. Reading music
7. Writing music
8. Moving to music

Not only do children need to experience music in these ways, but they also need to be given the opportunity to reflect on what they have done. The music teacher make time for classroom discussions so that the children can think about and talk about their musical experiences.

In chapter two, Montgomery further discusses the role of the music teacher in helping students make music meaningful. We teach music in a “spiral progression” - we don’t simply teach a concept until it is fully learned, and then move on to a new concept, we are continually introducing and reinforcing concepts all throughout our students’ musical journies. Montgomery says that, “children study progressively more sophisticated musical concepts…of music during each consecutive grade level”(11).

Classroom experiences in music must be developmentally appropriate if we are going to make music meaningful for our students. The same goes for any subject, really. For example, I was at a teacher inservice a few weeks back to look at strategies for French literacy. My students recieve 45 minutes of instruction in French every second day - they are definitely not as proficient as a student in French Immersion, who recieves French instruction for the full day, every day. The books they were showing us at this inservice were for our grade 4, 5, and 6 students. The books were simple enough stories, but the plots were contrived and juvenile - meant for a grade 1 French Immersion student. My upper elementary students will not find any meaning in those books because they are not developmentally appropriate. They are appropriate for their skill level, but not their developmental level.

Montgomery also encourages the “sound-before-symbol” approach to teaching musical elements.  This approach “provides a teaching process by which children experience music aurally, kinestehtically, and orally first, before labelling and reading its symbolic representation” (15). This is something that I’ve been doing with my grade 1 students. Since November, we’ve been thinking of specific words - usually seasonal. First, we just talked about the words, how many “sounds” each word had, putting the words into our hands (clapping), or into non-pitched percussion instruments. Then, we started putting strings of words together, later putting them over marked beat patterns (using hearts). Once we were really good at this, I started writing words on the board and would mark in the “sounds” using dots above the word. Then, after this, we started transforming our dots into “tah” and “titi.” This progressing has been incredible. It’s the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to teach students from square one, and I would definitely keep with this approach, maybe refine it a little more, but it works!

ok time to take a break…more to come later. 

Curriculum Review

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but one of my aspirations as a music educator is to one day (in the distant future!) develop, design, and write curriculum or teaching resources to share with other educators. I love research and writing almost as much as I love teaching! I realize that one can never know it all, but I do want to get several years of teaching under my belt before I start seriously pursuing anything of this nature. I’m not sure how many people would be interested in books about teaching written by a twentysomething with less than a year’s experience in the school system

I do, however, believe in starting early! I decided that if I’m going to develop any type of music curriculum or even music education resources, I need to see what is out there first. I need to do my homework. In my reading cue for the next couple of months:

•  ”Teaching Towards Musical Understanding” by Amada Montgomery
• “Play, Sing, and Dance: An Introduction to Orff Schulwerk” by Doug Godkin (I also plan to take some Orff level courses in the near future, they do not offer them very often in my area!)
• Several articles related to different philosophies of Music Education

Any other suggestions?

Oh the things we will do!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my school (the one I teach music at) is quite small - approx. 180 students in 9 classes over 6 grades. We don’t get a lot in terms of technology, usually the bigger schools get the cream of the crop, but we are starting to see some new things come into the school. I was told this week that our school will be getting LCD projectors installed into several classrooms around the school. I spoke up about how fantastic it would be for me to have one in the music room. Well. I’ve never seen such shocked faces in my life. “What in the world would you use an LCD projector in the music room for?”  Well. I told them. And guess what? I’m getting one

I can’t wait to get it set up and start sharing the ideas and lessons that I will be using in collaboration with the new LCD projector! I would love to hear your thoughts, though. Do you supplement your lessons with PowerPoint? Notation softward? Fill me in! 

slacker

I’m sorry I’ve been such a slacker with my blog lately! I think I’ve told you before that my job as a music teacher up to this point was only part time - we only have enough kids in the school for half a music teacher. Over Christmas vacation, I got offered a job teaching core French at another school, also part time. So now I am officially a full-time teacher (what a blessing! And in my first year! I’m so thankful!) between two schools. It’s been hectic, that’s for sure! But teaching the French classes has really been stretching me as a teacher. I teach grades 4-8 French classes there, and jr. high is new for me. I love the elementary, but I can say with certainty that I am not gifted for teaching jr. high - but I will take it as good teacher training!

On top of this, I’ve been getting masters applications ready, and will hopefully be starting some distance courses in the next couple of months…crazy! But I do promise that I will be back to the blog very soon!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

organizational tips

As music educators, we all know about the necessity of keeping organized. I’m sure many of you are just like me in that you see every student in your school for music class. That’s a lot of paper work, names, materials, and information to keep track of! I’m still a newbie at this, and I’m always picking up new ideas and strategies for keeping on top of things. Here are a few of the things that I do to keep myself organized at work. I welcome any and all of your suggestions!

#1. Colour-Coding

I know I’ve just recently talked about my love for colour-coding (read it here), but it truly is one of the most effective means of keeping myself organized. My school uses the “Share the Music” texts, and I simply colour co-ordinate everything to do with a certain grade with the colour of their text (i.e. Grade 4 has a purple text book. I write all things having to do with grade four in my plan book with a purple pen, I use purple post-its to label their worksheets, I use purple baskets to collect their things in, etc).

#2. Personalized planbook

I didn’t purchase a commercial teacher plan-book because none of the ones that I could find were suitable for my schedule. I made my own just using Microsoft Word. I print off pages as I need them and I keep them in a binder. I use index dividers to mark the months of the school year. This way I can tweak my planbook exactly the way I want it, and make changes if need be.

#3. Labelled instrument baskets

I teach elementary music, so the bulk of my instrument collection is made up of shakers, rhythm sticks, jingle tappers, finger cymbals, etc. I purchased several baskets from the local dollar store and separated my instruments into the baskets. I labelled each basket according to the instrument that was in the basket. Then, I separated the baskets into families (i.e. wood, metal, tappers, shakers, etc). Now my students know exactly where each instrument belongs, so we keep things tidy. I also use this to introduce my younger students to timbre and non-pitched percussion families.

#4. Post-it note assessment

I buy post-it notes in bulk. I love them. The super-sticky ones are great, and you can get them made from recycled paper now as well! I use them for close to everything, but my favourite use for post-its is assessment. I can quickly jot down a note or two about how a student is doing without it being overly obvious. Its much less menacing then writing in a grade book all the time. I simply collect my post-its at the end of the day and transfer any necessary information into my grade book. Because of the constant shift of students (new class every 30 minutes), the post-it method for keeping info is the most quick and effective.

#5. Graded resource binders

I keep a separate binder for each grade (colour-coded, of course!) with songs, activities, and lesson plans divided into units (I go by month). Like I said before, we use the “Share the Music” text, but I do not use it religiously. I have many other books and resources that I like to use as well, so I’ve basically began creating my own collection of resources and materials that I use to teach the required curriculum by photocopying selections out of the books that I own and placing them in the appropriate section in my binder. It will take me awhile to get it right (years, I’m sure! - and even then it will change constantly!) but I like having everything I need at my fingertips rather than searching through six or seven books to find what I wanted.

So there you have it - those are just a few of the tricks and tips that I currently use to keep organized. I’d love to hear some more suggestions and ideas! Please comment and let me know some of the things that you do to keep yourself organized!