October 18, 2014

Interactive Notebooks in the Music Room

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So in the last few months, I have heard a lot about interactive notebooks in the grade-level classroom. Out of curiosity, I clicked on a few listings on Teachers Pay Teachers to check them out. I found math and language arts notebooks, and thought, "Eh, I don't think this could be adapted for the music classroom." Let's face it, we get so little time with them as it is, how would we have time for notebooks too? Then a few weeks ago, I found this blog post on the TpT site, through the newsletter, and again read it out of curiosity. There were some interesting points about how …

August 21, 2014

Thoughtful Discussions in Music Class

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This past summer, I was fortunate enough to take a class through my district about making thinking visible. We use the word "think" a lot, but it wasn't until this class that I really thought about what thinking means! While I'm not an expert in the area of making thinking visible, I'm going to write about a discussion I had with my first and second graders that I found very insightful. When I took this course, I read the book "Making Thinking Visible." The book can be viewed on Amazon by clicking on the picture below. It is a wonderful read! While I read many of…

May 25, 2013

Creating criteria for evaluating performances

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As we approach the end of the school year, I often look at my grade-level indicators at what I wasn't able to cover, or what I wish I had delved into more. It would be wonderful to say we could get to everything, but with music only twice a week for thirty-five minutes, that can be quite the difficult task! One of the benefits about being a music teacher is that unlike classroom teachers, if we need to slow our pace down when we realize that students need more practice, we can without having to worry about how it might impact standardized tests. If we don't get to every single concept…