Teaching Notes, 20110601

I had to cancel the previous class because of an unplanned pediatric appointment, although I was able finally to get time with the tone bells. This day, it was also raining (very rare in June), and so I had to lead the students into the class quickly. I had the students sit in a squarish circle this time around.

Everybody Oughta Know	Lead students into class while singing
This seems to work well to have the students sing and walk at the same time. I got the class into the room with 3 iterations of the song.
How do You Dootee	Teach Chant, get class to move around to the chant
This was a chant that I learned from the Sanna Longden NCAKE workshop from last year. I taught the chant line by line, and after each line, we talked about what we were saying (e.g. "what area of the world is this from?", "what does 'shifting away' mean?"). Some students giggled at the chant (which admittedly does sound a bit silly), while some students enjoyed trying to talk with an Australian/English accent. After getting the chant mostly down, I then instructed the students to go find another part of the circle. The constraints were that they had to find that place in the duration of the last line, but they could not crash. Needless to say, the students had trouble meeting both criteria, but they were still having fun while doing it. I think in both classes I was able to restart the chant without delay only once. After I had the students stop and sit down, I asked them what worked and didn't work, and that provided some good conclusions about (1) going slow with the chant, and (2) ways to avoid collisions. It's moments like this when I do wish I had a large map of the world. I'll have to get one for next year.
Tone Bells	Have students play bells in chords, accompany song
Finally, I had time to have the students play bells. I started with a single student and I had the student practice playing while being cued by me. I found that a visual cue (like a hand passing a second hand) didn't work very well, and so I resorted to a verbal cue (hit, 2, 3, 4). I then brought two more students up, and we practiced as a group; the students' bells' tones formed a C chord (another term I introduced to the class). I then proceeded to bring up and practice with two more sets of three students - one forming a G chord, and one forming an F chord. I had the C chord group remain the middle group Next, I tried to get the groups of three to play on demand with me pointing. I kept the same beat/rhythm (e.g. playing on 1), to make things simpler. When the groups seemed to play together relatively well, I then turned to the students and asked them to follow me in song. I didn't tell them what the song was going to be; I just started singing the chorus to Teaching Peace while pointing to the appropriate bell group (most of the time). I found that it was hard to keep just playing on 1, particularly near the end of the chorus, so I started pointing on both 1 and 3, which I think tripped up the groups a little bit, but they recovered. We sang and played Teaching Peace once more before I switched the song on them and sang the Rattlin' Bog chorus. One thing I realized was that it was difficult for me to direct the singers and the bell players; each group of students faced each other, which meant that I had to keep turning around in order to direct both groups. Perhaps it would have been more effective to have the bell players facing in the same direction as the rest of the class, as the singers didn't really need to see the bell players.
Piano	Introduce the Piano
Last week, even though I didn't hold a music class, we had a roving MfM docent come by and do a presentation about various instruments for my students and older students in the school. The roving docent, near the end of his presentation, talked about how the piano was a combination of a "bang" (or percussive) instrument, combined with a "twang" (string) instrument, and I wanted to demonstrate this to the student. Plus, in the music room, there had been a piano mostly all year, pretty much unused, and it was overdue to show the piano to the student. I could not remove the board underneath the keyboard to reveal the large harp-array of strings, and so I had to open the top of the upright to show the students the action of the hammers and strings. And so, as students were marching out, I had them come by the piano and look from atop to see what was going on. I played The Rattlin' Can on the piano as they walked by and observed.

Yay, I finally got to the bells. I only have one class left with the students, and so I'll likely make that class a review of all of the really successful songs and activities.