Teaching Notes, 20111115 (2nd class)

For this particular week, I had to hold my classes at an alternate time and day because I wasn't going to be in town during my regular day. I only managed to teach one of my two classes, and the one class happened to be the 2nd of the two 3rd grade classes, which means that the 1st class was going to fall behind even more.

The music room wasn't available during this day, and so I held class in the students' regular classroom - this was actually the first time I ever held class in a room other than the music room, at any school. As a result, the students didn't have to walk into the room, and they ended up sitting in a grid near the front of the classroom.

Hello, World	Review song, introduce stanza
With guitar in hand, I sang the song with the students, and simply went right into the the stanza following the chorus. I had the students echo the stanza back to me, and finally we sang the chorus again. I didn't want to spend too much time on the song, so we moved on.
Hello My Friends	Review the song, add Korean
I had pre-printed out the lyrics to Hello My Friends in all of the languages, one language per sheet, and I had the papers taped together vertically in sequence. We sang through the languages that we had covered before. And then, I had Korean attached as the last sheet; the words were printed in Korean, and when I asked if the students could read it, they were a little dumbfounded. But I had also printed on the opposite side an English transliteration of the words ("annyeong nae chingu"), allowing the students to read and sing in Korean! After practicing the Korean lyrics, we then sang through the stanza in Korean, followed by ending the song up the language chain as we've done in past classes.
Seasons	Review the song and practice singing in parts
Similar to the previous song, I had also pre-printed the lyrics to Seasons (fall version), and hung the lyrics on the board. The lyrics were printed with each line in a different color, which then allowed me to split the class into first two portions, and eventually 3 parts (left, right, back). After a while, the students really started having a lot of fun with this as I varied who sang which part.
Sarasponda	Teach by rote, talk about the lyrics and song
I was never really able to teach this last year, and so I really looked forward to teaching this to the students. I emphasized how the students had to really watch me and what I was saying. I had the students also clap to "ret set set", something that I felt kept the song interesting as the words are otherwise nonsense. We eventually were able to sing through the entire song, while clapping to those three words every time. I'll definitely work on the song later in the year; we didn't even talk about what the song was about much.

We ended the day with Goodbye My Friends Goodbye, and out of the room I went.

I thought the class went pretty well despite not being in the normal room. I did actually spend a little bit of time talking about music without instruments (as we were without our usual assortment of instruments), and I ended up playing a few songs on my laptop (and its tiny speakers) that involved mostly a capella music. One of the songs ("Crayola Doesn't Make a Color") seend pretty interesting to some of the students, and so I might teach that song to the class formally later in the year.