Five Ways to Keep Your Class Totally Engaged in Music
By janice | January 24, 2012
What was your first experience of music? Was it dancing in the kitchen? Listening to a parent sing along to the radio? Or perhaps, pounding the piano keys with your sister or brother?
As educators, we aspire to re-create the experience that made us want to learn more about music. At their most fundamental level, we want our classes to be havens for self-expression, where students feel safe to explore and learn. Here are five simple strategies to help you keep that spark of learning in your classes, with an eye toward children’s developmental levels, the intrinsic need for play, and maintaining control of the class.
1. Maintain Eye Contact
Whenever possible, stay at the students’ level. Young children are bound to get distracted, for example, if you need to walk across the room to sit behind the piano. This is why the guitar works so well when teaching music to children. Its portability and positioning is ideal for instruction within the intimacy of a circle. Sit down with students to set the tone that music is something to be shared.
2. Modeling
Sometimes nothing is more powerful for spreading the music bug than to watch the depths of human expression come alive in a performance. Sharing one’s passion about something can be contagious. You may try spontaneously playing something you’ve been working on or inviting a guest to the class, such as a peer from the high school or a parent who makes his or her living in music. Save time for questions and answers, and make note of what intrigues your students.
3. Allow for Movement
According to the Orff approach, children learn best when teachers create an atmosphere that is similar to a child’s world of play. An Orff-inspired classroom is based on “things children like to do: sing, chant rhymes, clap, dance, and keep a beat on anything near at hand.”(1) Use echo clapping to call the class to attention or teach rhythms, and march together to the beat of a drum. Make instruments available to children that they can easily play, such as xylophones, tamborines, and maracas, in order to access their natural curiosity.
4. Use Collaborative Classroom Methods
When students’ interests and choices are incorporated into the lessons, they will inevitably be more invested in the class. What do your students know? What real-world examples can they bring to the forum and how can you capitalize on this? For example, older students may be asked to share some of their favorite pop songs. Play them in class and analyze different elements of the piece (instrumentation, rhythm, beat, notation). For a lesson on composers, ask collectively, then write student-generated questions on the board: What do we know (about Mozart)? What do we want to know? And after the lesson, What have we learned?
5. Keep Instructions Concise
Try using singing or sound cues to signal various routines in class, such as a chime to tell students when to quiet down for meeting time. Have students choose from a variety of songs in various music styles to use for a cleanup song (one class I taught chose Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5” as a cleanup song). To help students internalize routines and understand desired outcomes, keep verbal instructions to a minimum and instead, model or show students what you want them to do.
i American Orff-Schulwerk Association. “What is Orff Schulwerk?” Copyright 2011
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iBook 2: How Does this Affect The Music Teacher?
By janice | January 23, 2012
“There is no reason today to assume that our kids have to use the same tools they did back in 1950 – Infact to do so is to prepare them for a world that has already past”
This was a quote taken from some of the marketing video streamed last week, in Apple’s latest presentation in a bid to help teachers face the challenges of education today. In the launch Apple’s senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller talked about how they can help in the area of student engagement in the classroom and he ran a short video stating some of the challenges that teachers face in the classroom. Here are some of the teacher quotes from the video shown:
“ Education is in the Dark Ages- No fundamental changes have occurred in 150 years”
“ It’s very difficult to be a teacher and to be a student when resources are not available; when class sizes are 40+ and buildings are in disrepair”
“ Students have difficulty with reading writing and arithmetic at the high school level”
“ There have been studies of classroom walk -through throughout the country and (generally) there are very low levels of student engagement and kids are just bored!”
“You can’t expect them to go from a world at home where they’ve got a laptop or a smartphone in their pocket, or a computer on their desk and come into school and have all that disappear”
“Unfortunately not all classrooms have all the technology or even textbooks they need to succeed”
“Teachers get very discouraged when their students don’t succeed and graduate knowing that their teachers have failed them or the system has failed them”
“The ability to engage a student is the key to being a good teacher”
“Using outdated materials such as textbooks make the job (of teaching) much more difficult”
“Textbooks are usually very expensive- they’re usually $50-$100 each, so they’re adopted for 4-5 years and then you’re usually stuck with them”
“Textbooks are usually heavy and if you have three or four of them in a backpack, they’re a lot of weight- so some students will quit bringing them to school”
Apple’s answer to the challenge of promoting more student engagement in the classroom is a new iPad application called iBooks 2 . I’ve put this short guide together to explain it in a “nutshell” and to look at some thoughts about it’s use – especially in the music classroom.
What is iBook 2?
As Apple’s senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller explained in Thursday’s launch, textbooks are outdated – They are often old, dogeared, expensive to buy, students don’t feel they can highlight them, they are heavy and these days the information inside often dates before the book has been released from the publishing house. Since The iPad has fast become every teenager’s number one wish list item, using an iPad to encourage reading text books in the classroom is the future of learning.
All any iPad user needs to do is download iBook 2, which is a free application to their iPad. This application enables any user to browse though textbooks of different categories and add them to their bookshelf. In the classroom, a teacher would suggest a textbook for each student to use and each student would download the book for a cost of around $15, which is a very competitive price compared to any traditional text book publisher.
Thursday’s onstage presentation of iBooks 2 outlined some exciting features which included:
- An opening page movie- to get the reader excited and motivated for their learning ahead
- Interactive Images- you can easily enlarge the images shown in the book and you can even interact with the images, by writing labels, playing simple games and categorising them in the right order
- Unlike traditional textbooks there is no crease in the centre- so this makes for an easier read
- Each student can easily highlight relevant notes in the textbook and write a comment about the notes- then this information is displayed together on a separate page for easy study later on
- Relevant notes can be automatically made into learning flashcards
- Navigating new unknown words is easy- simple press the word in question and you’ll go to the glossary section at the end of the book.
- The textbook can incorporate an end of chapter revision quiz- where students are actively revising the content of the book as they progress through it
Take a look at this short YouTube Video put out by Apple which brilliantly outlines it’s use and need:
How Could it Be Used in the Music Classroom?
This seems like a great new system to encourage learning and technology with junior – upper high school students. What do you think? What would you be looking for in a Music textbook for this age group? Would your students afford an iPad each to use? Could you imagine using an interactive textbook with your classes? Let us know what you’re thinking on this “hot’ topic as any new advancements in technology are always great reasons to network with the wider teaching community.
Other Helpful Articles:
Live Streaming of the Apple Announcement
iBooks 2: A Guide to The Free Textbook App
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Introducing Percussion to Primary School Children
By janice | January 18, 2012
The value of movement in connection with learning is unparalleled in our elementary and primary classrooms. In cultures around the world, exploration through percussion is a natural way of connecting children to the group and developing their motor responses. Movement through music, furthermore, helps stimulate the brain and integrate the right and left hemispheres
After extensive observations of how young children learn about the world by interacting with objects in their environment, physician and educator Maria Montessori once wrote,
“Not only are thought and action two parts of the same occurrence, but it is through movement that the higher life expresses itself.”
Since the action of drumming comes easily to children, exploring percussion is a way to open the door to a broader appreciation of music and achieving the benefits that music has to offer.
Here are some ways that you can introduce percussion instruments and percussive music to your students. After these starter activities, you may want to devote some time with your classes to discuss what kind of sounds were heard, what is rhythm, and how a song can be made with beats:
Play the Room – Taking caution not to strike anything that is fragile, allow children to explore the room with drumsticks. Tap the floor, tables, chairs, desks, doorknobs, and shelves. For discussion, ask what makes a loud or soft sound, and what object kept the longest sound. Have children sit in pairs, taking turns “playing the floor” and listening, to help make the connection between vibration and sound.
Create Copycat Rhythms – Clap a pattern and have students echo-clap back to you. Encourage other children to be the leader for the group “conversation.” Copycat rhythms can be created by stomping feet, jumping, or with drums or shakers in the circle. Connect rhythm to what children know by singing familiar nursery rhymes and clapping to the beat.
Play the Jungle Beat – Start with pictures of different jungle animals and talk about what kind of sound characterizes that animal. With stomping feet in hard or soft, slow and fast beats, practice together how an elephant or rhinoceros sounds. How is this different from the sound of a monkey walk, or a tiger stalking its prey?
Use Found Objects – Objects everywhere from the kitchen to the junkyard can be used to make a sound. Ask children to bring something from home that they think makes a good sound (pots and pans, lids for cymbals, graters or scrapers) and have them introduce the sound in the circle. What rattles, clatters, or jingles? Talk about the qualities of the sound, and then conduct the group in an orchestra of stuff!
Introduce Instruments that Children can Easily Play – Instruments such as the xylophone, tambourine, maracas, triangles, glockenspiels and bongo drums are ideal for their ease of play and varying percussive qualities. Allow time for children to explore the qualities of their sounds, or have a set space in class so that children try making their own music with instruments that they choose.
Listen to Great Traditions – The music of Ghana and Nigeria has particularly rich drumming traditions. Listen to recordings from Africa and other cultures to expose children to the masters of percussive rhythms.
Reading about percussion instruments and exposing our students is a first active step to introducing elementary aged children to percussion instrument playing. One way to learn more is by sharing your own ideas and strategies with the wider Fun Music Company community using the comments box below. Be sure to leave your feedback giving details of your favourite strategy for teaching percussion to elementary and primary children so you can network with other teachers and find new ideas and strategies together.
You’ll also find some tips on how to properly play some beginning percussion instruments at our percussion secrets video which is presented by an expert percussionist who makes learning percussion instruments very easy to understand. If you’re looking for something which is a hands on approach to general music percussion with elementary/ lower primary students and you have access to an interactive whiteboard, you can access a ready to go lesson and watch a video at http://www.funmusicco.com/interactive-whiteboard.html. Alternatively, if you would like to have more music percussion ideas for upper primary students, you might also be interested in my article called “Teaching ideas Using STOMP in a general music class” which will give you all kinds of ideas on junk percussion and other percussion instruments that will motivate mid- upper primary students.
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Topics: Classroom Music, lesson ideas, Music Resources for young children, music teacher resources
