Getting To Know You, Part Two

A couple of weeks ago, I had the honor to present a Saturday workshop for an Orff chapter out west.  I've been presenting sessions since 2005 at local, state and even a few national conferences and even shared a few ideas for a few hours at a time with music teacher groups supervised by friends of mine.  But this was the first time I was invited to travel, present a full day workshop and get paid for having a good time hanging out with like-minded people and sharing some of my favorite activities.  Score!

At the workshop, I openly shared this fact:  in my previous teaching position, I was lucky enough to see my students twice a week plus every other Wednesday.  That school is on a trimester report card calendar so I was able to see my students 30 times before reporting a music grade.  This frequency of instruction allowed me to really get to know my students and garner a fairly accurate knowledge of their skills.  In my current teaching position, so-called "specials" classes are on a 6 day rotation.  That combined with the quarterly report card (nine weeks) means I see my students a total of 6 times before report cards are sent home.  As any pre-schooler might be able to tell you, 6 is a lot less than 30!

Needless to say, it has been a lot more challenging to get to know my students when seeing them so infrequently.  Name tags have helped.  Seating charts (for some classes) have helped.  Luckily, I have 16 years of experience to keep me afloat as I navigate these new waters.  Aside from getting to know my students, I have had to take a really good look at what I'm teaching them.  Thinking back to my first year of teaching, not knowing any better, I just taught the next song each week and never really allowed my students any time to get to know the material.  Over the years, I learned that spending some time with the material is crucial to fostering students' understanding of it.  Worrying about checking off a list of standards that students should know does not foster good musicianship.  Spending time with good material, enjoying it, nurturing it and watching students grow with it is, in my opinion, much more important.

To that end, I have looked at some of my traditions and had to say, "maybe next year."  There just isn't time enough to do them justice.  Happily though, some have remained in tact because I feel they are worth the time.  For example, during the last entire grading period, my Kindergarten students learned about the Bremen Town Musicians.  It is a unit that typically lasts 6 class periods or, in this case, an entire nine week quarter.  But it has been worth it.  Every one of those 6 class periods was packed with singing, movement, literacy, instrument playing and, well, standards.  For the curious among you, here's what we did:

• Classes 1 and 2:  read through the Bremen Town Musicians story.  Any version will do, but I prefer the illustrations in the Ilse Plume edition.  As I read the story, the students make the appropriate animal sounds each time one is mentioned (donkey hee-haw, dog woof woof, cat meow, rooster cock-a-doodle-doo).  Each time an animal "goes down the road to Bremen Town," we sing a theme song I wrote and get up to move like the animal just introduced (gallop, walk, tiptoe, run).  We also run when the robbers run away, tiptoe when one of them comes back and run again when he runs away at the end.  One the story is finished, I show the students how to make rhythm patterns from pictures of the animals and play them on instruments.
• Class 3:  Rooster Day - we do a movement activity to Mussorgsky's "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks," we sing Let's Put the Rooster in the Stew along with John Feierabend's Choppity Chop rhyme.
• Class 4:  Cat Day - we sing Ding Dong Diggidiggidong (from Music for Children), we share stories of why the cat might be gone, we sing The Cat Came Back.
• Class 5:  Dog Day - we sing BINGO and practice taking away the letters one by one, we sing Bow Wow Wow and learn the lovely circle dance that goes with it.
• Class 6:  Donkey Day - We sing Sweetly Sings the Donkey, Donkeys are in Love with Carrots (with movements I learned from someone at a recent Orff workshop - thanks!) and sing and move to the Donkey Riding Song.

After spending so much time on Bremen Town Musicians, you'd think the students would get bored with it but, no.  Not true.  Not one student groaned, "not again!" as I suspected they might.  Instead, they enthusiastically asked, "What animal are going to learn about today?"  Score!