It is hard to believe, but “Music In Our Schools Month” is already here! This month is all about advocacy ~ so let’s take some time to show the community what we do! Here are 3 last minute concert ideas that you can easily execute without a lot of work! You can highlight all of […]
Music class is not the usual place for students to work in small groups. We don’t see them very often or for a long period of time, so we cram in as much as we can in the time we have. Usually, the fewer the transitions, the better! So why bother trying it out? Having […]
Confidence comes from doing what you thought was not possible….or so the woman on my workout video says who also screams at me that I can indeed stay in a plank position for 45 more seconds as I am yelping in pain. When I am in said pain, I can’t imagine being confident about anything! All […]
After we sang their compositions a couple of times, I asked the students if they liked the order of their measures. One first grade boy mentioned that he wanted the measure with the gray to be last, so we switched the last measure with whole note measure. We sang it through to see if we […]
Yesterday the boy choir and I played around with the measures they composed a couple of weeks ago. I taped each work to the board in no particular order for us to sing. My goal was for students to think about choice. Both groups were able to switch measures around, but only the first graders […]
Yesterday our boy choir students created rhythms. I did not specify a time signature, so they were able to create any rhythm they wished, as long as two eighth notes and four sixteenths were next to each other. One second grader created a 5/4 rhythm that consisted of 1 half rest, one quarter, 2 eighths, […]
When I taught in a combined first and second grade regular classroom, the head teacher always wrote a “morning message” that was to be read as soon as the students came in the classroom in the morning. This message often included the activities of the day or something special that was going on soon. It […]
Different school models fascinate me, regardless of my opinion of its effectiveness. No matter the set up, we as educators can learn from them. This morning I read about a “democratic school” out in Maryland called The Fairhaven School. This school and schools like it, are designed to create the freedom for students to explore their interests and […]
According to the Center for Disease Control (From the CDC website): Approximately 11% of children 4-17 years of age (6.4 million) have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2011. The percentage of children with an ADHD diagnosis continues to increase, from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007 and to 11.0% in 2011. Rates of […]
When popular business books speak about marketing, a large majority of them emphasize the importance of an enjoyable and memorable experience when they use your service or product. For teachers, our clients are our students…(even though it sometimes feels like we need to please parents and administrators). When kids step into our classrooms, what kind […]