March 12, 2014

Five Favorite Pins of March

No comments

So now that it's almost the middle of March, it's time once again for my monthly linky party! #1: Creative and respectful ways to quiet a class This blog article has lots of fun ways to get your students quiet! Sometimes, I feel like I get stuck in a rut with the same old techniques, so it was fun to read some new ideas (and I appreciated how many of the strategies were musical!) #2: Encouraging Critical and Creative Thinking I am always looking for ways to encourage critical thinking (which is why I created my Critical Thinking in the Music Classroom Bundled Set ) so I was excited when I …

February 17, 2014

Solfa manipulatives

6 comments

Today I'm linking up with Lindsay Jervis' Monday manipulatives linky party, to blog about solfa manipulatives!  One of my favorite ways to have students use manipulatives is solfa manipulatives. I first came upon the idea of solfa manipulatives when I was studying in Hungary. My friend Bonnie presented about it to our level III class; she had learned about them in a previous level. I adapted the idea she presented a bit, and came up with laminated circles. Here is a picture of my students working with solfa manipulatives; usually I have them work individually, but this class was so bi…

February 12, 2014

Five Favorite Pins of February

9 comments

Since it's almost Valentine's Day, I realized it's time for my linky party for February! If you are a blogger, feel free to join the linky party by following the directions at the end of this post. Here are my five favorite pins this month! You can click on each picture to be taken to the original pin. #1: Self-assessment folders This pin shows how you could use these folders to have students assess themselves with exit tickets. I recently posted about The Bulletin Board Lady's exit ticket set , and I think these folders could be a great way of both collecting exit tickets AND hav…

January 25, 2014

Monday Music Manipulatives: Staff Writing with Erasers

3 comments

Today I'm excited to once again link up with Lindsay Jervis for her Monday Music Manipulatives linky party, to blog about staff writing with erasers. Today will be a simple and short post about staff writing with polar bear erasers! My first graders have been deep in sol-mi preparation. I've been getting them used to finding lines and spaces on the staff, and then figuring out which line or space (3rd line, 4th space, etc.) Once students were comfortable with that (which took a few lessons of working on the skill for a few minutes), I handed a staff paper to each student, as well as two…

January 19, 2014

Five Favorite Pins of January

2 comments

Hope you have had a wonderful start to your year! Since we are well into January, I figured it was time for my Five Favorite Pins of January! If you are a blogger, feel free to join the linky party by following the directions at the end of this post. Here are my five favorite pins this month! You can click on each picture to be taken to the original pin. #1: 36 Clever Ways to Decorate Your Classroom There are SO many great ideas here about how to decorate your classroom, like contact paper to spice up your file cabinets, stenciling quotes or phrases on your walls, and so much more! I will especi…

December 18, 2013

Five Favorite Pins of December

No comments

This December has been pretty busy, between preparation for the school-wide singalong (which is tomorrow), my choir concert (which was last week), and Christmas shopping (which is constant!) Still, I wanted to take some time for my five favorite pins of December! Those of you who are teacher bloggers, feel free to link up! Directions are listed at the bottom of this post. Here are my five favorite pins of the month: #1: How to Read Music Visual How cute is this? I plan on printing this out and posting it in my room. It would be especially beneficial to my band and recorder students. If you click…

November 27, 2013

Turkey Rhythms

3 comments

A few weeks ago, I found a pin on Pinterest that I thought was really cute for classroom teachers: I wondered if there was a way I could adapt this idea to rhythm. I was excited when I found foam turkeys on Oriental Trading . When they came in the mail, each set looked like this: They actually came with one more smaller paper plate, but I discovered that overlapping and then gluing paper plates together was much harder than it looked, so I turned it into a one-paper-plate craft! After gluing all the parts on, the turkeys looked like this: Each turkey came with six feathers, but I only used five. F…

November 20, 2013

Five Favorite Pins of November

2 comments

I've been so busy lately participating in the linky parties of other teachers that I forgot about my own! Here goes my monthly linky party, this time for my five favorite pins of November. If you are a teacher blogger and would like to participate, see the link-up directions at the bottom of this post. #1: Before John was a Jazz Giant I love children's literature, and I love jazz, so I was super excited when I found this book on Pinterest! The illustrations are beautiful (by Sean Qualls, the illustrator of Dizzy , another jazz book) and the text looks poetic. I just bought my copy (you ca…

November 18, 2013

Autumn Manipulatives

1 comment

Today, I'm excited to be joining Lindsay Jervis' linky party, to blog about autumn manipulatives for rhythm writing! I just love the dollar shelves at Target, not just for fun goodies for my daughters, but for teaching! Recently, I found bags of pumpkins, gourds, acorns, and leaves and decided I had to use them in my classroom! I bought seven bags and stored them in fun buckets I also found at Target, like this: Then I used them in learning centers with my first graders. They just learned ta and ti-ti, so at one of the centers, the students found the two buckets. Then, they emptied the b…