Music

Today I got to be a music teacher at an elementary school.  Throughout the day I had eight half hour classes with different grades from 2nd-6th graders.  It was definitely a very different day.  First up, a half hour of planning.  During this time I read over the lesson plans thoroughly and tried to get ready for my first batch of classes.

Enter 4th graders.  The class came in and retrieved their recorders and found their seats.  I located the class helper who found the Activboard flip chart (think of it as a fancy Power Point) and attempted to start the first song.  Then, disaster struck.  The music icon on the flipchart didn't work.  Suddenly I have twenty 4th graders all telling me and their poor peer how to make it work.  "Try right clicking it," "You have to double click it, "Only click it once" were their knowing commands.  All failed.  After the first few tries I knew that somehow the board got into design mode where it only recognized the icon as an item, not as something that you click to make sounds.  After waisting a third of the class trying to make it work, we decide to try the songs without the music.  Horrible mistake.  They made it halfway through the first song before dissolving into senseless noise.  Next we attempted playing the acappella song.to much more success.  I insisted they practice this song two more times.  By this time the group was very frustrated and I submitted to their pleas to play a game for the last 10 minutes of class.

Luckily the first class was the worst.  For the next three classes the kids read an article about Motown music out loud and I asked them a few questions to get them thinking about the music style.  After lunch I taught the third graders a new song with much success.  The final two classes were second graders.  For these classes the students looked through their music text book and picked songs that they wanted to hear and/or sing along to.  I mostly played the part of facilitator and got the songs ready to go and asked them a few questions after each song.

Not a difficult day, but a strange day.  I am very glad that I have some basic music knowledge, otherwise the third grade singing class would have been forever long.  They were only working on one short song.  Without the knowledge of what to tell them to work on for each time practicing the song would have been extremely tedious.