Teaching Notes, 20110420

And now, we're back! It's been 3 weeks since I last taught, and I was ready to get back into teaching. During the last scheduled class, my first class cancelled its music class for that week, and so I felt I'd be ok redoing a lot of what I did during that week, and effectively do a review for the 2nd class. That turned out to be just fine, as many of the 2nd class students were quite happy to cover material that we covered nearly a month ago.

I also wanted to do some more rhythms in parts, and so I had the students walk in deliberately into four even (as much as possible) lines parallel to the front board.

Teaching Peace	Reintroduce song, lyrics and partial echo. Reintroduce chorus and stanza terms.
I wrote the lyrics to the chorus on the board, and I wrote the stanza in partial echo using elipses; e.g.: …take my hand …come along … … …brand new song etc. I wanted to get the students to become used to trying to sing just their part regardless of what I was singing. In this case, they were almost echoing everything that I was singing except for that 3rd line, which made things a bit easier than if they were singing something totally different. We practiced singing this way a few times before I tried it using the chorus as a lead-in. It took just a little bit of extra practice, but eventually both classes got it. I revisited the terms "chorus" and "stanza", but it seemed like few students really understood what those terms meant. For the second class, I took this a little farther. The last line of the stanza normally has no echo whatsoever (and I noted this on the board), but instead, I had the students chant "1, 2, 3, 4" during the last full measure of the stanza. Now, that took a lot of extra work, and I had to time my gesturing to them when to come in. Only perhaps 2 or 3 students could come in without my prompting. Also, for the second class, I tried throwing in the 2nd stanza without rehearsing it with the class (or having the lyrics written on the board). It was actually working really well until I couldn't remember the "sing out loud" line correctly; I sang "sing out high, sing out loud", which sort of left me high and dry (and rather embarrased).
Clapping Rhythms	Have the class clap rhythms printed on paper.
I had typed out 8 sheets of single-measure rhythms and taped them on one side of the room: QRQR eeeeQR QQQR QreQR QRQQ RQRQ eereQR QRRQ Q = quarter note, e= eighth note, R= quarter rest, r = eighth rest I had the students sitting in 4 rows, and I had the students face the sheets so that I had two sheets assigned to each group. I then had the class practice each of the rhythms one at a time. I didn't have a lot of time, so I sort of drill-seargeanted the patterns one at a time. I found that patterns #4, 6 and 7 were more difficult than others for the students to get, and I had to illustrate them a few extra times for the students. Next, I had students clap the patterns that were assigned to each line. Effectively, that was two measures per line. However, for the second class, I found that they weren't picking up the patterns quickly enough, and so I reduced their assignment to one measure per group, and I used measures #1, 2, 3, and 8. We were able to run through the cascading patterns a few times. I then showed the students the tone bells, and I played for them the 8 patterns, one pitch per measure, up the scale. The students started clapping when I finished, which surprised me a bit. I do hope to introduce the bells to them more formally at a later date.

For the second class, I did have the students sing the chorus of Oh My Goodness (which I had written on the board) one time before they exited. The first class exited quickly after the tone bell demo.