I don't know if you noticed yet, but I LOVE using children's books. I find them that most lessons that I teach are just not complete until I have a chance to read with the children. I have a fairly extensive library in my music that is in need of organization, but now that I've found Pinterest I have hope that I can get it done....
Today's post is primarily to introduce a new series that I'm going to develop.
Every few weeks, I'll publish a new list of books that I have in my library. Each list will be topical and include the ISBN information so that you can print off the list and give it to your school librarian, or principal with their favorite soda and candy bar attached. So that when you ask them to "pretty please" order these books for your classroom, you'll be prepared and ready to go. Keep a copy with your scholastic book club information, you never know what titles you may come across. Keep a copy in your purse for the next time that you find yourself with the luxury of time to visit a bookstore. Print this list out and use it to hunt down titles with AJK books at donorschoose.org. I've gotten a good chunk of my classroom library through them and purchasing single titles is a little bit of a challenge, so a list is always a good idea. If you are a cautious buyer of books, take this list with you to your local library and try them out with your students before you commit to a purchase. Or keep this list by your computer and as you have time, create a wishlist for yourself on Amazon.com or on Barnes and Nobles. Eventually, you will have a great library in your music classroom, and if you already have one, you'll be able to fill in holes. I hope that you find this information helpful. The first few lists will be based on previous blog posts.
In getting ready for today's post I found another book that I want! If you have it, let me know if you enjoy it with your students. According to Amazon, this book comes out March 20th, 2012..... It looks familiar, so maybe that is the paperback edition. In any case, it's another book with Woody Guthrie music that I just have to have.
For as long as I can remember, I have written music for pleasure. I write for myself, I write for my friends and I write for my family. I write as an expression of my faith in Jesus Christ.... but as much as I write, only occasionally do I write music for school.
THE NEED!
The thing about writing music for school is that it is typically born out of necessity. When you NEED a song and you don't have the right one, sometimes a new and original song just happens.
Special Occasions
The VERY first time that I had the need to write a song for school was actually upon the death of a dear friend and colleague who was killed in a tragic car accident. Our school was stricken by the sudden loss and my students needed a way to express their love for this popular teacher they had lost. I was new enough to writing music that I wasn't very quick at music dictation, so as I wrote my co-worker drafted what I was playing and singing. The song I wrote that afternoon has turned into my go to "occasion" song. I gently shift the words here and there so that when most people hear it they would never guess it was intended for a memorial service.
Since that time there are a couple of things I've realized about writing music for school.
Keep it Simple! - Ask yourself, Is it universally singable? Writing a song for the entire student body is not the same as writing a song for your honor choir. (in terms of range I would stay between b-d'')
Can you play it? -If you can't play your song while one hand is directing your chorus and you are "eyeballing" the talker on the back row, it's too hard! You might like to rely on a recording, but what if the power goes out? We call them "special" occasions because they are "special" and weird stuff happens.
School Songs
Every school ought to have a school song..... PLEASE, even if you don't have time this year, PLEASE at some point at least try it or at least commission a piece. My first school where I was music teacher at for 10 years has a beautiful original school song that was already in use when I became music teacher there. That song is both singable and simple and all of the students, teachers and parents know it by heart. It brings the entire school together. It's a wonderful way to begin or end school events of all kinds.
When I came to my current school I was utterly dismayed to discover that a school as old as mine had never had a school song of any kind. How sad! I decided to take my time and for the last two years I've written a "class song" for my graduation 5th graders. After this year, I'll have accumulated 3 songs about my school. I am going to teach all three of them to my choir and then do a scratch recording of the students singing the song. THEN next year, I'll introduce them to all of the students and staff and we will all vote. After-all, it's not MY school song, it's OUR school song. PLUS, my hope is that by giving myself 3 chances to get it right, my compositions will improve. Remember since a school song is an "all-sing" , make sure that you follow the rules for specials occasion songs. Content Buster Songs
Everybody knows that declarative knowledge (the names of things) and to some extend procedural knowledge ( how things work) is easiest to remember if you use a song or an acronym or other memory device. When my students are struggling to remember key vocabulary, sometimes I will be asked to come up with a "diddy". Just this last week, my team of art, music and PE had a meeting with administration to see how we could help with improving vocabulary that held confused our students on the latest benchmark. I'm always very intentional about integrating all of the other subjects into what I do, but sometimes even a little explicit intentionality goes a long way. So I brought the vocabulary list home with me so that I can see what I can come up with over Spring Break....(man it sounds like my spring break will be 3 months long.....) Ideally, these little "diddies" should go back to the classroom WITH the students, especially since knowledge application and transfer are the REAL problems....... SO it helps if the classroom teachers you are supporting can sing the songs too..... wait...... you have teachers at your school who are afraid to sing? ME TOO! So a pre-made CD then...... There are some good ones...... Sometimes you can find these songs already created and recorded by someone else which means that all you have to do is make sure that your teacher friends have legal copies. OH..... wait... you mean spend money?..... OK, so now we're back to composing our own little "diddies". You can still put them on a CD for moral support, but if you write them yourself then you have the rights to them.....
The BEST and MOST useful chants are the ones that we write WITH the students, BUT if you don't have time. then......
I HIGHLY recommend enlisting the help of the teachers whose classes will benefit most. This is critically important in order to clarify definitions.
Chanting is plenty! - don't worry about melody, rhythm is enough!
Here is an excerpt from a 1st grade chant that I created with my first grade team a few years ago....They were studying the states of matter and wanted to introduce both vocabulary and conditions.....I've looked EVERYWHERE for the whole thing which I can't find, but here is the part I remember.......
Sometimes liquids are viscous (repeat 2 times)
( ta --- ta --- ti-ti ta --- ti-ti )
With a SLOOOOW STICKY FLOW
(ti-ti taaaaaaa ti-ti- taaaaaaa)
Speaking of well done, pre-composed chants...... In my search for vocabulary support I found this great site. I've got my free 14-day trial and I expect to be listening to some of these chants so that I can see if it's worth my $5.00 a month......
If you are like most music teachers that I know, you've had your share of professional development in language arts and math. I'm finding that one of the most useful aspects of these processes of teaching literacy is the cognitive transparency that occurs. A teacher reading to her class will share her thinking about what she is reading. A teacher writing in front of his class, will share his thought process about word choice or voice. I feel like literacy is literacy is literacy, so I thought I'd give it a try in music. So, I got my guitar out and composed a song transparently in front of my students using the kids names and what they were wearing. THEY LOVED IT! Some of the verses I wrote were funnier than others..... One was about wearing a white shirt on spaghetti day, while another mentioned something about wearing green must mean that you love trees. I brought transparency into the process by guiding them through my melodic choices and pointing out how the rhythm of the words informs how I create the rhythms rather than the other way around.....I was working more with aural discrimination and even word choice in terms of rhyming. I wanted the students to hear when the song was finished. On this particular day, I didn't worry about notation, I was primarily concerned with sparking the conversation about composition with the students..... we'll use their own compositions to notate as this one would be rather complex. This is a practice I want to continue to develop.
Songs of Encouragement!
If you are like me and you teach music at a public school, your school life is dictated by whatever standardized test your state uses so show that your students are progressing compared with everyone else.
If you've ever taught at a school with a significant population of "at-risk" students, then you understand the obstacles that these children face just getting to school, let alone succeeding in school. Making a full year of academic growth is a huge accomplishment when by February you've gone to your third elementary school for the year. Passing a standardized test is an even bigger achievement because for most "at-risk" students. In order to pass the test, these students must bring their "A+++++ game" to school and then show up with it on test day too!
It doesn't matter that last night, after your mom got off of the evening shift at work, your family had go to the store to buy milk at 11:30 p.m....... It doesn't matter that because your family had to go to the store so late, you have to wear yesterdays uniform that has lunch stains and a rip in the seat. It doesn't matter that last weekend your aunt moved out, so now your mom doesn't have enough money for the rent and you just busted out of your only pair of shoes....... It doesn't matter.... those tests, like real life....... will wait for no student.
However, since I GET to be the music teacher, I can encourage and support my students to do their best on those pesky tests.
Just before spring break my help was enlisted in organizing a TEST pep rally..... not my favorite thing to do, but I know my students will love it........ My biggest problem is that over the years different "alternate test day lyrics" have cropped up for whatever popular song is currently IT.....Rather than being put in the awkward position of being "copyright shady".... Isn't it better to create something original and meaningful that can be adjusted to the specifics at your school? Time is REALLY the key.... so first I'm going to suggest that you subscribe to Music K-8 because they have a great collection of songs that will fit the bill for most folks.
However, when you set out to put something both encouraging and fun together for your students for an event like this, play around with looping and sequencing. It's a skill that if you don't use it for a purpose, then you'll never learn how to use it.
This summer I got 3 Macbooks for my classroom that have Garage Band on it. I took a 3 hour class this summer and have been on my own ever since. Without a project to point toward, I've not really learned anything. But I decided to bring one home over Spring Break because I knew that this testing shindig was in my near future and I want it to be good because my kids need LOTS of support!
So this afternoon I started playing around with some of the loops and I found one that I liked and in about 45 minutes I had this track recorded. I'm sharing it with you because I think that for the time I spent on it (not much) is sounds pretty good....I think my students will be impressed and amused. Plus I'm amused by the fact that I now have a track of ME rapping..... that is really funny.....I also figure that it's a pretty safe track to put out there because unless you are a Wildcat, you can't steal it...... and no one wants to hear a recording of a almost 35 year old lady rapping..... yeah.... I'm not worried.....If you do decide to share it, let me know, and give credit. Maybe you'll even enjoy it enough to laugh with me at the simple joys of teaching elementary school music and all of these creative ways we can support the learning of your students.
This fall I had a project funded through donorschoose.org for a pack of small handheld
digital recorders. Since I have never had anything like this before in my
classroom, I was filled with all sorts of dreams about ways that we could use
them in class to create digital portfolios of student work.
Well, I'm here to
say that the reality is even better than I had hoped.
When I received my
Easi-Speak pack I was right in the middle of 5th grade show and then it
was the holidays and well....... I'm just now getting around to playing with
these little guys with any sort of intentionality. So far I'm just giddy with possibilities!
Here is what I've tried so far!
Scratch Group Recordings:
The 100th Day of school sort of snuck up on me, and since I had my
guitar with me that day, we made up a song.
It was pretty cute as far as ridiculously on the fly song go, so I
thought I’d record the children singing it with me. I thought that
the digital recorder did a good job of capturing the entire class singing. It’s by no means a quality for public
sharing and it is no replacement of "real" recording equipment, but it is a good representation of the “daily”
work done in class and certainly a good addition to a digital portfolio.
Individual Recordings:
I REALLY like this, probably because this is how the microphones
were designed to be used. So far, I’ve
only had one recorder out at a time, but I think that soon I’ll have all of
them out at once. Wouldn’t it be nice to
be able to create an accurate record of student singing that is a concrete
support of your qualitative rubric? The
nice thing is that since these recorders are designed to be used by one student
at a time, even with background noise, you still get a REALLY nice sound.
Emergency Practice Tracks:
There you are with only about 1 class left in your voice and that
afternoon you have your less than independent choir students coming in for
rehearsal. I wore the recorder around my
neck and recorded a rehearsal track for my students who sing part 2. Now granted, I was at a
piano with a volume control, but it was so much easier than any other option
available to me at the time.
Discipline documentation:
So I have to admit that I discovered this by accident. It’s that
time of year where the chatty cats and cathys in my class have gotten rather
bold and the effectiveness of those natural consequences that worked just last
week is slipping. Creativity is in order to keep my students from "spring breaking" too soon.
I’d been playing around with my little recorder when my class with my favorite
chatty cat who uses ALL of my creativity came into class ready to see if I had
any new ideas. Lucky for me I still had
my little recorder in my hand. I smiled
hugely at him, pointed out the red “record” light and said, “This microphone
will record all of your good work today, why don’t you wear this around your neck and sit close by me today.”….
He was literally stunned into silence. And THEN he asked good questions and did
his work. It was a PERFECT day! Not to mention the fact that a few of his “chatty
cat crew” wanted a microphone too…. I told them truthfully that my microphone
would catch all of their good work too.
They were good as gold.
Eventually one caught on and said, “What if we aren’t good?” I said, “Oh, it will catch that too….” PRICELESS!
Ideas that I haven't yet tried!
· Record
instructions for an independent activity or EVEN record your sub plans, burn it to a CD and you are all set!
· Auditions
– now that my students are learning how to use it, the next step will be to
formalize the procedure. I either have
to figure out a way to create blind auditions, OR I have to train my students
to always say their name and teachers name before they start singing or
speaking because the whole idea would be to have them do their preliminary
audition just outside where I can see them but they can’t be disturbed during
their audition. I’ve still got some
figuring out on how to make that work realistically.
· I
also want to use this for small group interactions. I want to give each group a task and have
them record their conversation. It would
be a great way to keep record of who was really involved and who was more
passive.
The possibilities are endless..... What if you recorded your private lessons and gave your student a CD of the lesson? What if students interviewed their teachers about their musical experiences? What if students used these little recorders as a tool for music composition? I need one for each student!
What happens once you are ready to hear what you recorded?
· You
could choose immediate playback which is useful for immediate feedback for students.
· You
use the USB port on your computer and when you do all the MP3 files come
up. They are in a folder and are
numbered. I had to rename them because I'm not organized to remember what I did when......
· If you record for a long time, it will record
in small seamless chunks
· You could choose just to rename them and keep
them as a record as they are.
· OR you can import them into Audacity. Audacity is loaded on each microphone and if you want
to edit the files, you can open Audacity immediately from the folder. EASY!
I LOVE children's books that share great information in a meaningful way even better. I find that children's books are especially useful in helping my students experience Jazz.
Today I'm going to share my very favorite Jazz books as well as a few that are on my "I can barely wait" wish list!
You can use these books as part of a larger in depth study of jazz OR you can sprinkle them all over your lessons so that Jazz just becomes part of what you do in your classroom. I've used them both ways and there are distinct advantages to both.
Jazz Books that I use all the time - if you are wanting a nice survey of Jazz music or simply want to provide your students with a "toe in" to the deep sea of Jazz music, I would suggest the following titles.
"The Jazz Fly" is just a great book for all grade levels. The CD also makes it a great choice for poor voice days or substitute teachers.
"The Jazz Man" is a reinterpretation of the song "This Old Man" so it can be used to compare and contrast with the old folk song.
"Jazz on a Saturday Night" is a great choice for older students. The CD is very informative and quite good.
"Jazzy Alphabet" is fun to read and a perfect for Kindergarten and First grade.
Jazz Books that I love: - I pull these great books out when I want to focus on something specific, either a specific Jazz Artist, OR a specific jazz style.
"The Hip Cat" is an awesome book to read aloud and does a great job of getting into the cool lingo of jazz and telling the tail of a struggling jazz musician who eventually makes it big.
"A-Tisket A-Tasket" goes wonderfully with the song by Ella Fitzgerald. I use it with first grade.
"Ella Fitgerald" - It's always great to have as many biographies on hand. This is a great one.
"Jazz Fly 2" - This book is similar in format the the original, but this book embraces and explores Latin Jazz.
Books on my "I can hardly wait" Jazz Wish List:
I am hoping to put together a list of books for a project on donorschoose.org. If you have one of these books, please feel free to add a review of the book in the comment section.
Today's post is primarily to introduce a new series that I'm going to develop. 
