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Janine's Music Room

Thoughts from a PYP music teacher

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Kindergarten

Easy assessment of music concepts—even for a sub!

The chaos of pandemic-year teaching sure compelled me to streamline my assessments! When working with early childhood classes, a lot of the learning is focused around contrasts in four main concepts: duration (long and short), tempo (fast and slow), dynamics

Janine 30. July 202114. July 2022 Uncategorized No Comments Read more

“High” doesn’t mean loud: Clearing up the confusion

Pitch and rhythm are a great pair in early childhood music. Students often use the words “high” and “low” to talk about “loud” and “quiet”, which we want to sort out as early as possible. Teaching in an international school,

Janine 5. June 20215. June 2021 Assessment No Comments Read more

Vocal Exploration Through the Town

I always take time for vocal exploration in my early years classes. It’s so important to get them comfortable with their voices, and work on their flexibility. We focus just on echoes for a while, and then we think about

Janine 13. March 202111. July 2021 Uncategorized No Comments Read more

The Game My Kids Want All Year

Even in this crazy world, I think we can all agree that one of the most important things in early childhood is developing a sense of steady beat. Music teachers have hundreds of ways to support this, but I’ve often

Janine 10. October 202010. October 2020 Group activity, Whole class activity No Comments Read more

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

Janine 9. February 20182. April 2018 Group activity, Song, Whole class activity No Comments Read more

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

Janine 4. February 201827. March 2018 Group activity, Song, Whole class activity 2 Comments Read more

Setting up a Sound Exploration Station

Every music teacher knows how much students just want to experiment (make lots of noise) when they come into a room full of instruments. As people, this probably drives us crazy, but as teachers, we should rejoice in the enthusiasm

Janine 1. November 20166. April 2018 Inquiry No Comments Read more

Developing New Units: Kindergarten

As I wrote in this post… A while back, our school put the entire How We Express Ourselves theme into the hands of the Arts teachers. In a lot of ways, this was a fantastic idea. (And in just as

Janine 10. October 2015 Unit 2 Comments Read more

The Listening Walk, Part III: Following a Score

Now that the students had inquired into how they could make their observed environmental sounds into musical sounds (inspired by Paul Showers’ The Listening Walk; see my Part I and Part II posts), we took it a step further. We visualized the

Janine 30. April 20159. August 2015 Group activity, Inquiry, Performance 2 Comments Read more

The Listening Walk, Part II: Making Sounds into Music

Following our inquiry into environmental sounds (inspired by Paul Showers’ The Listening Walk), we explored how that might translate into music. Sitting together as a class, a few students shared some of the sounds they had drawn/written in their journals,

Janine 24. April 201521. July 2015 Group activity, Inquiry 4 Comments Read more
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