Caring for our environment is becoming more and more important every day, and with Earth Day just around the corner, we have a perfect chance to integrate some environmental consciousness into our learning. Today’s students are very aware of environmental
5 Great Circle Games from Around the World
As I wrote last week, I love to play singing games with my classes. Not only are they fun and catchy, but they offer a lot of teachable content. It’s up to you what you want to pull out, but
5 Great Circle Games for Your Music Class
Singing, games, and holding hands! I love playing circle games with my kids. And my kids love playing them. They love the catchy melodies, the movement, and the challenge: For some games, that’s the challenge of doing the right thing
Earth Day
April brings Earth Day, which is observed by people in countries all over the world. For the most part, our students have some awareness about the environment, and they quite naturally feel the need to take care of it. No
Composing with Body Percussion
It’s a frustrating thing the day you realize that your Grade 4 students are still confusing beat and rhythm, and that they don’t read rhythms quite as well as you imagined they should. I dare say—and feel free to challenge
It’s Just Around the Corner…
I know we may not be ready to think about it, but none of us can hide from all those Back to School sales. Are you thinking about how to get the year started yet? (Okay, I’ll confess that I’m
Inquiry: Musical Cycles
Following a previous post, someone asked about our inquiry into cycles. The main inquiry point is that the layering and varying of simple musical patterns can create a complex sound, and that this cycling technique is used in several musical
Exploring Musical Cultures Through Concepts
All the way back to my teacher training, I have always tried to incorporate as much “world music” (sorry, I don’t like that term) into my teaching as possible. From PreK and all the way up, we sing in many
Settling In
I have been in schools before where the classroom teacher quietly leads their class, single file, to Music. But more often than not, my classes now come running in, still engrossed in the conversation they had started on their way
Do the Locomotion
I went through a big overhaul of my curriculum recently, digging deep into cooperative groups, more creative composition, and authentically student-led inquiry. I was well into it, however, when I stopped to reflect and realized that movement—which had once been