the start of year two and classroom photos

I guess I will have to change the name of this blog since I am no longer a “First Year Music Teacher”! I officially go back to work on Thursday of this week for two teacher workdays, and then the students return on Tuesday after Labour day. I was working in my classroom all day today, and I am getting excited!

I’ve made lots of exciting changes in my music room. I am going to POST PICTURES once I get everything set for the first day. I’d love to see pictures of other elementary music classrooms…I’ve been searching on google and on youtube for music classroom photos, but they are hard to come by! If anyone of you readers are elementary music teachers would be willing to post pictures of your own classroom and let me know by commenting on this post, I will post a link to your pictures. I would love to see what your classroom looks like!!

Sweet summer

My summer vacation officially started today. I know that sounds strange, seeing as the end of our school year, and the last workday for teachers was June 30th, but it is true! After school let out, I went to work for a week with our Provincial department of education correcting 6th grade literacy assessments with a team of 50 other teachers. It was actually a lot of fun! I admit, it was tough to sit for hours at a time, reading story after story, but I think – as a beginning teacher – nothing could have been better for me. In my province, many music specialists have to take on classroom assignments in addition to their music assignments simply because the schools are too small to accommodate a full-time music teacher. This experience will definitely be useful to me. After that week was over, I had several concerts to play in. Now, for the rest of this week I am completely free!

So now, for the summer I will be working at a local restaurant 2 days a week as a cook, performing in a few concerts here and there, and otherwise, just relaxing! I know it is CRAZY, but all I can think about is planning for the next school year! I have had several urges to head into school and pick up some of my resources and start revamping my unit plans. Isn’t that crazy? I haven’t even been out of school for more than two weeks, and already I am thinking about September!! So far I have been successfully ignoring my impulses, but I don’t know how long this will last. I am so anxious to begin getting things ready for next year!

I kept a list all throughout this past school year with songs and resources that I felt that I would like to use again, and also things that I felt didn’t work. I also have things that I didn’t get to try this year that I would like to try in the coming school year. It’s so exciting! I’m such a nerd, I know. I also just ordered my textbooks for my first Master’s course that begins in September…I am very excited about that, too! Nerd, again, I know. At least I’m sure that some of you out there understand

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.

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?

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!

“I Sing!”

I have a little boy in my grade 2 class who gave me a major heart-melting-teacher moment last week. He’s the same age as the other grade 2 students, but he functions at about the same age as a 2 year old in some respects, and younger in others. I’m not sure of his diagnosis. He only began walking in the last year, and has slowly increased his vocabulary to approx. 30 words this year.

This particular class had been working on a piece called, “When Santa got Stuck in the Chimney” for the Christmas concert last week. At the end of both verses, there’s “Achoo! Achoo! Achoo!” This little boy couldn’t sing the words to the song, but he COULD do the “Achoo!” – and with gusto! He was so proud of it. Anytime he would see me at school, he would bellow out, “ACHOO!!!” and point to me. It was adorable!

On the day of the concert, his EA’s were wondering if it was really smart to include him in the concert, as he can be quite moody. He was having a good day, and I really wanted him involved. He was SO excited during the dress rehearsal, jumping up and down, smiling, and laughing. As the class was leaving the stage after their dress rehearsal, he started achoo-ing at me, and murmuring and mumbling. His EA and I were standing with him as well as another teacher, and we heard him say as clear as day “I Sing! I Sing!” – Something he’s never done before. I was so excited and happy that my eyes even welled up a little bit.

That night at the concert, he got all of the “achoo’s” exactly in the right spots