Teaching Music Tomorrow - Season 1
Episodes
The concept of fast and slow is one of the earliest foundational concepts we introduce to our students. In the land of comparatives, it’s one of the most accessible for our young musicians, because they have so much gross locomotor experience moving fast. The discrimination between learning slow and fast is an important scaffold for talking about tempi and note durations later on in music learning.
Today Anne & Victoria share some of their favorite activities for using faster and slower, as well as some good teaching strategies to scaffold the experience appropriately for your young learners. Both of these activities can be incorporated into your very next music lesson to compare fast and slow.
Part-singing is one of the most integral parts of the general elementary music classroom. Rounds are an important part of a part-work sequence, but are not the first experience or even the most accessible way to explore part work for beginners.
Today Anne & Victoria talk about how to use rounds in a lesson, an appropriate sequence for teaching these activities, and some tips and tricks to make rounds more successful in your teaching. Anne’s song, “Scotland’s Burning” is sourced from “150 Rounds for Singing and Teaching,” published by Boosey & Hawkes. Victoria’s song, “Sahhaa Sahhaa” is sourced from nordicsounds.info.
Elemental Form is one of the most basic ways to break down music in the elementary music classroom. Whether we are talking about singing, movement, or any other mode of music making, we use elemental form every single day in our lessons. From introducing new song material to scaffolding for students’ creative choice, elemental form is not only a concept on our curriculum roadmap, but a tool for student understanding.
Today Anne & Victoria break down different ways to teach elemental form with two concrete activities you can use in your classroom tomorrow. Not only do we explore activities that highlight form, but we talk about ways to use elemental form as a scaffold for creative choice.
When you think about the many different modes of music making we use in the elementary general music classroom, you may not immediately think about speech. However, like singing, speaking is an important first step (and beyond!) for all musicians to explore comparatives, creativity, and expression.
Today Anne & Victoria are talking about speech pieces they use in their classrooms. Victoria is sharing a rhyme that can easily be scaffolded for upper elementary grades with layered ostinati, and Anne is sharing something that works well as a first experience for students using speech and making creative choices. Both you can drag and drop into your classroom today.
Movement can be a scary word. Although it’s embedded in our music making and our music classrooms, finding opportunities to engage our students in purposefully creative movement can leave us feeling overwhelmed and intimidated. So what do we do? We find ways to simply build upon what we are already doing.
Today Anne & Victoria are talking about the first steps you can take toward facilitating creative movement in your classroom. We start with activities that you are likely already familiar with and doing with your kids, and simply take the next step to facilitate student choice and get their creative juices flowing! You can find the notation for “Willowbee” (also spelled “Willoughby” in some sources) in the Holy Names Song Collection.