Today is the last day that I will see *new* classes for the year, so tomorrow starts my second lesson of the school year.
This year I am trying to make Centers a big part of the music classroom. Since I have 60 minute classes, I would love to spend half the time doing a whole group activity and the other half doing some centers- adding on as the year goes. As I stated last week, 1st grade will be learning how to use the Musical Groceries Center, and 2nd-3rd will be learning how to use the Lego Rhythm Center. Links and credits are included in my previous post.
The other thing that will be a big part of our week will be our Hoffman Boston All Star School Song!! Last year each class in the school K-5 worked together to write a part of this song, which is now sung at each major event in the school community. Each class will be recording a video of themselves singing the song that will be broadcast in classrooms before our morning news, HBTV. It is so great to see that returning students still know the lyrics and movements!
PreK and Montessori will be working on procedures and learning a little more about our Australian animals, the Platypus and Kookaburra, using books and the chant "Down Under".
Kindergarten will continue their Farm unit, using Game Plan materials, with a visit to the Hen House!!
4th grade will continue working with recorders after writing in their listening notebooks.
5th grade will learn the 5th Grade All County Honors Chorus audition song and then play the following Drum Circle Game:
We just started yesterday and got things rolling slowly, but today PreK starts and it's going to be all sorts of crazy in the hallways! I'm excited to have a full day of music making with my kids!!
Before I get into my classroom tour and all that fun stuff that everyone has been doing for the past two weeks, I thought I'd ease back into blogging this year by linking up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings and her "Peek at my Week" Linky Party!
I teach PreK-5th grade, so my days always include a large range of age, skills, interest, etc. This year, I have been fortunate enough to receive a part-time teacher to help with my class load. Jeanette will be here on Mondays and Fridays to work with some of our classes. I'm excited to be able to work and share ideas with someone else!!
This week, each class is taking a tour of the music room, where they will see everything from my "Rest Area" to my tissue box (because I'm tired of telling students that they can just go get a tissue if they need one!!). Each class is also revisiting our Hoffman Boston School Song, which the students wrote last year with the help of Brian Chevalier, a visiting artist and children's songwriter.
I have my 1st-5th grade classes for 60 minutes each, so I can fit a lot of activities into that one period. Here is my summary of activities for each class:
PreK/Montessori- learn names with the Hello and Goodbye songs, be introduced to new songs and chants that we will be using over the next two months
Kindergarten- I used the Farm Unit from Game Plan last year, which includes a recurring song to introduce the animals, as well as songs and activities to fit the animals each week- this week we will be learning about the Duck!!
1st Grade: We will work on matching words with 1 and 2 sounds to rhythms, as well as learning one of my center activities, Musical Groceries (Thanks to Ashley Queen), to go along with it. We will also be learning Punchinella, a musical movement game from the 1st grade Game Plan book. It comes at the end of 1st grade, but I find that it is a wonderful 1st day activity!
2nd Grade: We will review rhythms from last year using Ashley Queen's Lego Rhythm SmartBoard files. We will also add the half note to our rhythmic vocabulary. This will then translate into one of our Center Activities for the year. We will also review and play Punchinella from 1st grade.
3rd Grade: We will have a Snowball Fight!!...with papers that have some of our favorite songs written on them. Each student will then have the opportunity to guess whose paper they pick up when the fight is over. We will learn the audition song for our new All Star Singers, which will meet before school once a week, as well as do a Listening Challenge (thanks to Jennifer Fink for this worksheet), one of which we will hopefully be completing each week in music class.
4th Grade: We will start using our listening notebooks to reflect on Taylor Swift's new song- "Shake It Off." Then we will use recorders to review last year's musical knowledge.
5th Grade: We will continue to use our listening notebooks from last year, play some Rhythm Review Football, and write a Soundtrack to Our Lives!!
I hope that everyone else has had a smooth start to the school year, I will post more about my classroom, etc. once I have gotten my balance here in VA!!
So after participating in two of them this week, I thought I'd start a Linky Party of my own and maybe see who else is reading my blog!
I feel like Britney Spears was part of the beginning of my (maybe misguided) music education, so in her honor I'm hosting a party called "Oops...I Did It Again!" to show a successful teaching idea that has carried over to the next year. Please link up below if you are interested in sharing your multi-year successes!!
My "Oops I Did It Again" success is creating a medley of pop songs for 5th grade promotion. If you want to check out 2013's medley, click on this link. This year, my group is a bit more manageable, however they are into that end of year mode where they really are ready to move onto 6th grade...3 more weeks- oof!
So just like last year, they made suggestions of what songs we should put into our promotion medley and I combined them into one song about 7 minutes in length. The songs included are:
Wing$- Macklemore (I changed the words of the rap at the beginning and used the chorus part)
Neon Lights- Demi Lovato
Best Day of My Life- American Authors
Pompeii- Bastille
Brave- Sara Bareilles
Let It Go- from Frozen
Cups- Anna Kendrick
Some of the songs have short solos in them, which I just held auditions for this week and assigned this morning- we will see how they react- I think I was too nice, I gave most people who tried out a solo or a duet, but hey, it's elementary school!
I'm excited to see how this one turns out, but feel free to watch my video of the medley yourself! The karaoke is included for everything except the rap at the beginning, but here are the lyrics to that:
I was eleven
years old, when I got to this school
And I stepped inside, And I was like, Momma,
this school right here, it's gonna make me fly I hit those halls, and when I jumped, I jumped, I swear I got so high I touched the net, Momma I touched the net, This is the best day of my life
I look forward to hearing back from any of you about your "Oops...I Did It Again" moments! Add your link below!
Hi again! I'm loving these end of year linky parties, so I'm latching onto all of them now that I'm in the home stretch of my school year!
Here are 10 things I want to do this summer:
1) RE-LAX!! I just moved into a new apartment with an awesome balcony and pool and I cannot wait to sleep in and enjoy my time off!
2) Spend time with friends and family and in new places- starting with the Poconos and ending with a trip to Spain, I am planning on making the most of this summer and seeing everyone and everything that I can!!
3) Be a presenter at Arlington's Festival of the Minds. I am presenting two workshops, one Beginning GarageBand and two sessions on Reflective Teaching in the Technological Age- focusing on using blogging and Pinterest as reflective teaching tools. I'm excited to be the one imparting some of my knowledge for once!!
4) Add some new summer recipes to my list! Last year my roommate and I made some interesting pasta salads and fun meals while we had our summer time off (she is also a teacher), and I am looking forward to doing that again!
5) Figure out how to integrate more of my resources into my teaching next year. I use SO many things: Spotlight on Music, Game Plan, and countless SmartBoard and iPad resources, plus whatever I have gained from Pinterest and reading other blogs, but I haven't mastered the ability to really make them all work together. I want to try to do some of that this year.
6) Plan next year's 3rd Annual All School Show. I want next year's to have a literacy theme, so I'm already pondering what we will be doing. :)
7) Try to figure out if I am actually creative enough to open a TeachersPayTeachers store next year- who knows!
8) Figure out some fun date nights for my boyfriend and I around the D.C. Area!
9) Read some of the books I've been dying to read, but always fall asleep before actually picking up!!
10) Come back to our in-service week in August feeling refreshed and excited for a new year of teaching adventures! :)
I'd love to hear about what you all are planning on doing with your summers! Link-up by clicking the picture at the top of my post or comment on my post here!
Hi everyone! Today I am linking up with David over at Make Moments Matter to celebrate some of my teaching milestones this year. :)
1) I finished my second full year of teaching in March (I graduated in December, so I taught for half a year before my first September)! I am so happy to be teaching music for a living, couldn't imagine my life any other way!
2) I was able to blog more, though I plan to be more diligent about it next year. I also gained SO much knowledge and lots of exciting resources by reading other blogs and taking advantage of TeachersPayTeachers!
3) Started a Faculty Choir at school! We met every Wednesday for a half hour and had a blast- a great way to get through the middle of the week. They performed at both the Winter and Spring concerts and did such a great job- can't wait to continue this next year!
4) My 5th grade chorus performed at the South Arlington Pyramid Concert in February and rocked the house with a Hoffman-Boston favorite- Zombie Style!!
5) I put on my 2nd Annual All-School Show, encompassing grades PreK-5, called Science Rocks! Just as it was last year, this was a great success and such a wonderful way to build community in the school between students, staff, and parents!
6) I will be presenting about the advantages of blogging and Pinterest at an All-County Professional Development Week- Festival of the Minds! I'm excited to share what I've learned and to talk with others about their experiences. :)
We still have 3 1/2 weeks left, but I'm already excited to see what next year brings!!
So our VA state tests (called SOLs- Standards of Learning) are coming up at the end of the month and our younger grades are going to cheer the older grades on at a pep rally next week. This means that each class will present a musical excerpt or video montage for one of the older grades (K paired with 3rd, 1st paired with 4th, 2nd paired with 5th).
I, of course, went a little overboard when planning what the 3 grades would prepare for their musical selections, but they are:
Kindergarten is doing a version of Do You Wanna Build a Snowman? from Frozen,
Please feel free to comment if you want the full lyrics to any of the songs, but I've uploaded all of the songs to Vocaroo for your listening pleasure (sung by yours truly)- just click on the links above to listen! You are welcome to use any of them, but please let me know how they turn out for you!! I'm excited to see how our performances turn out next Friday!
Some of you might remember that last year, I decided to put together an All-School Show, where everyone in the school participated in a collaborative performance. Last year, we put on a Music K-8 Magazine show called Hungry to Learn- click here to read that post- and it was a huge success, so my principal wanted me to do a similar project this year.
Since my school has a STEM focus, I decided to find something that connected to that theme. Soon enough, I found another show from Plank Road Publishing called Science Rocks!
This year, almost every student in the school grades PreK/Montessori through 5th participated, save for a few special education students whose teachers felt it was too much sound/light/etc. for them this year. Due to the large amount of PreK/Montessori students in my school, I opted to break these students up into three groups with a different song for each, which worked WAY better than having all 120 students on the stage for one song like last year!
The songs for each grade level connected to one of their Science SOLs (Virginia's standardized tests are called Standards of Learning or SOLs). They were as follows:
5th Grade- Rock It!- 3 classifications for rocks
4th Grade- Clouds- 4 types of clouds
3rd Grade- Not Your Imagination- animal adaptations
2nd Grade- The Life of a Tree- life cycle of a tree
PreK 2- Flower, Stem, Leaves and Roots/March of the Plants- parts of a plant
My awesome art teacher and some of our students worked on a beautiful set (pictured below), with a panel for each of the songs/themes.
We had a dress rehearsal during the day, so that all students could be involved, and then an amazing amount of parents and students showed up to the night time performance, after which they were able to participate in some hands-on STEM activities. I am selling DVDs of the performance as a fundraiser for the music program, which will give me some much-needed funding for next year's concerts!
It is a HUGE undertaking, but totally amazing in the long run, so if you have the chance, do try it at your school- the community building alone is worth the stress and hard work!
Thank you to everyone at my school who made this possible for a second year in a row, and to my family and friends for getting me through it in one piece!
Have you done anything similar? I would love to hear about it!! Please comment on this post to share experiences, ideas, or suggestions!
