Teaching Notes, 20120308

Last week, I had classes in the individual classrooms instead of the music room. The experiment went reasonably well, and so I decided to try it again.
This time, both classes of students started out on the colored carpet, which meant that the students for the first class were off to the side, while the students of the second class (like the previous week) were seated near the center of the room close to the whiteboard.

I'll Sing A Song	Review song, teach in different languages
Originally I had planned on singing Teaching Peace, but for some reason, during the first class, it seemed more natural to start with I'll Sing A Song. Plus, with the first class, I wasn't prepared to have the students to the side of the room, and so I lost a bit of momentum while I was figuring out where I would put my lyric sheets. Perhaps also, I felt that starting the class off again with TP would lead to too much fatigue with that song. Anyhow, with I'll Sing A Song, I started simply singing it (or humming it during the second class), and students started singing along. As the students were singing, I showed them a two-sheet lyric sheet of the song, and I attached it to an easel (or the magnetic whiteboard for the second class). As they continued to sing I took out and unfolded papers showing the lyrics of the same song, this time in Spanish, and as the students were finishing up the song in English, I put the Spanish lyrics on the board. The students, almost automatically started to sing in Spanish; the majority of them (in both classes) happen to be exposed to Spanish at home. I spent a little time asking the students what each line meant, and they were able to provide answers pretty quickly. We also talked briefly how the direct translation wasn't exactly the same as the English words, but the message was basically the same - and that difference was perfectly acceptable during translations. I did the same thing with a set of lyrics in French, but none were able to sing immediately, so I had the students echo the lyrics back to me. I also walked through the song, asking the students what the lyrics meant. I also asked them what "ensemble" meant in French, and what that exact same word meant in English. The principal of the school happened to be observing part of my second class, and since I know that there's a bit of an interest to emphasize languages other than Spanish, mostly because a lot of students already get Spanish at home (and after all, the school is a Mandarin immersion school), I knew that I had to get through the 4th set of lyrics, which happened to be in… Mandarin! I actually had to recreate the lyrics from Mandarin using Google Translate and my imperfect understanding of Mandarin. Amusingly, when I discovered that I didn't have enough space on the easel for all 4 sets of lyrics, the students insisted that I cover up the French lyrics with the Mandarin ones, rather than cover up English or Spanish.
Teaching Peace	Add "sound off" followed by count chant
The final piece of Teaching Peace that we hadn't covered yet was the "sound off" part, but before we did that, I took my ukulele and we sang through Teaching Peace through the chorus, one stanza, and the chorus again. I then asked the students to listen for me to say "sound off", and then their instructions were to count "1,2,3,4" like they did during the stanzas, but to do it four times in a row. (I quickly asked the students how many beats that represented.) I then sang another stanza, another chorus, went right into "Sound off", and the students obliged with counting. After the 4 bars, I went into another stanza, followed by a chorus, during which I raised my hand up to indicate we were going to go to coda - although the students forgot that they were to repeat the last two measures of the chorus. I had a little bit of time with the second class, and so I had the students revisit the lyric sheets for the chorus, and I had the students attempt to recreate the rhythm for the first three measures. I had to simplify the rhythms a bit since we hadn't covered sixteenth notes yet, but during the rhythm re-creation for the 3rd measure, it was clear that I was losing the students a bit, so we stopped there, and then went outside…
Leprechaun Dance	Teach a simplified version of the dance
It was a good week and a half before St. Patrick's Day, and so I wanted to teach a dance over the course of two weeks. I hadn't done this for two years (mostly because last year's group was a little too chaotic), but since I've had mostly positive experiences so far with the students and dancing, I decided to try this out. This dance involves basically groups of three students trying to walk in concentric circles around a common middle pivot point, and getting students to understand how to walk so that they remained like a hand of a clock together was very difficult. For the first class, it was a struggle to keep the students together; I had one group of three practice walking (and not entirely successfully before I added a second group on the opposite side. For the the second class, I took it a little more slowly, having just two people on opposite sides walk alone (as if they were moons around a planet) before adding the 2nd and 3rd student on the outsides of the initial two students. With two groups of three, I'd then have them practice walking (4 bars of 4 again), and then I'd have the students practice the "leprechaun" move - where the middle of the three squats down, the two outer students form a bridge over the middle student, and the middle students scoot over to the group directly in front. Students not involved in the dance at this point became more intrigued. Eventually, I'd add more groups of three. For the first class, I ended up having 6 groups of 3, and for the second class I had 4 groups of 3. (18 students in motion turned out to be a whole lot). Not everyone got to dance, but not everyone wanted to, and that was fine with me. Students in the first class argued a bit about who got to be the leprechaun (I had actually ended up upsetting a taller student by having a shorter student be the leprechaun, as sometimes students found it easy to cause crashes when a tall leprechaun was trying to fit under a arm bridge made up of shorter students), and in the second class, I had the teacher choose students. I think in the future, I'll have the teacher choose; it seems to eliminate any source of contention. After going through the song once, we only had a little time left to go back inside and talk about what worked and didn't work. Playing the music was universally regarded as something that helped, as students would clap during the beat (and I would time transitions based on the beat). The dance has a lot more to it (arm stars, for instance), and I hope to add those features to next week's class.

I typically write these blog entries nearly one week after the class took place, and I have to say, I'm a little worried that I won't be able to revisit the Irish Jig before St. Patrick's Day, as it should be raining during my next class. We *might* be able to do the dance in the classroom, but it'll be tight.

Teaching Notes, 20120301

During last week's classes, there was a lot of construction noise that easily bled into the classroom, even with the door closed. And so, at the suggestion of one of the teachers, I held class in the students' regular classroom. I did that a few months ago with one of the classes, but since then, the students had moved to another building as part of the construction process, and the rooms were now a little smaller than before.

For the first class, the room had no central open space, and the only significant open space had no board nearby; for that class, I had the students seated at their normal desks, facing the front of the room. For the second class, there was a carpeted open space near the front, and so the students (who serenaded me with Tommy Tinker and Down The Line as I entered) were seated nicely there.

Teaching Peace	Review song, have students sing 2nd stanza
I had printed the lyrics to Teaching Peace, one measure per sheet, and connected the lyric sheets with tape so that the song could be read horizontally. With the lyrics attached to the magnetic whiteboard, I first reviewed the song by echo, and then we sang the chorus together. Before continuing, we reviewed the terms "chorus" and "stanza", and then we went right into the stanza. Students remembered the partial echo well, but only a few remembered the "1, 2, 3, 4" that we chanted at the end of the 1st stanza. And so, I had the students re-practice the 1,2,3,4, along with the stanza, before proceeding back to the chorus. Next, I informed the students that while the lyrics of a chorus may not change, the words to a stanza often does, although musically the pattern is usually the same. And so, I started singign the 2nd stanza, and they did well with the first two echos. I had to walk them through the partial echo of this second stanza, and then when I got to the end of the stanza, I cued in the class to chant 1,2,3,4 again, and some (but not all) did. We ended with singing the chorus one more time. I forgot to ask the students what the form was. But, I did note that for a song like this, we could do something different at the end, and we reviewed what a "coda" meant, along with the hand symbol that I've been using for coda. I then took a market and marked the last two lines (sheets of paper) of the printed chorus to mark lines that we'd be repeating as part of the coda. We practiced this once.
Rhythm charts, measures	Dive right into reading kodaly rhythms
I started off with asking the class what the most important number in music was (4). Then, I drew out the four familiar vertical bars, representing 4 beats. I then introduced the concept of a "measure", which was (for our purposes) just a grouping of 4 beats, and the amount of time required to play those four beats. Measures can be concatenated to make long sequences, some as a long as a song, and so I added another set of 4 beats to the left of the first ones that I drew, and we all clapped all 8 together, while I counted only to 4 twice. I then pointed out that each clap or line represented one quarter of a measure, and so it was a quarter note. I then pointed to the lyrics for Teaching Peace, and noted that each piece of paper represented a measure from the song; the chorus had 8 measures. I then pointed out that the number of syllables changed for each measure, and none had exactly 4, which meant that the rhythm was more complex than 4 identical notes. I took the third measure, and I had the class try to sing it while I counted 4 steady beats; I then had the class try to figure out where/when the extra syllable showed up. I then went back to the drawn measure of 4 identical beats, and then replaced one quarter with a pair of eighths, although I didn't call them that quite yet. We tried clapping the rhythm a few times, and then I asked, if one of the standard beat notes was called a "quarter", what should we call the smaller ones that took half the time (and went twice as fast)? No one really figured out the question, and so we had to organically find the answer. In the first class, I wrote out a series of eight eighth notes, and it was easy to point out that one of these faster notes was an eighth of a measure and therefore called an eighth note. For the second class, I asked them "what is a half of a quarter?" I think one or two students were able to do the math and came up with 1/8, but I still ended up writing out the large measure of eighth notes. At this point, I started flipping through a series of pages, each containing one measure's worth of quarter and eighth notes (no rests). The slides went something like: QQQQ (what we started with) EEEEEEEE QQEEQ QQQEE EEQEEQ QEEEEQ The possibilities are (almost) endless. But after that set of slides, I could tell that the students were getting tired with clapping. Some students in the first class resorted to tapping their desk tops. Only in the 2nd class did I alter the names of the quarter and eighth notes with "slow" and "fast", and eventually "ta" and "ti". Unlike last year, I didn't want to get so hung up on the Kodaly names, and so at times I continued to talk in terms of quarters and eighths.
Seasons/Winter	Sing, record a round
I did this only with the first class, but I wanted to attempt to record the students singing the Seasons song in a round. I had the lyrics pre-printed on 5 sheets, connected vertically, and as a review, I simply showed the lyrics, one sheet at a time to the class, and the students responded by singing the song. I asked if someone could sing the song as a solo, and one person volunteered. I then split the class, half at the back facing the student, and the other half facing me. I then had the back half try singing with the student leading her half of the class. I then instructed my side of the room to try singing only after I cued them in. We first practiced by having the back half sing the song entirely while I led my half only after all 4 bars had been sung by the other half. Next, I repeated the exercise, but I had my side of the class come in at measure 3. We tried this one more time before I recorded the attempt. I don't have an external or moveable microphone for my laptop, and so I'm limited as to where I can place the laptop without risking it getting handled by curious kids. With the split at the "horizon" so that I had a back and front half of the class, having the laptop with me at the front really meant that my side, including myself, was drowning out the back half. During the last recording, you can tell that the song starts ok, then gets really loud, and then drops a bit when my side of the class sang measure 3. However, it was impossible to hear the back half's words clearly when everyone was singing. I told the students that we'd try again later, and they were excited by that prospect.
A Capella Exploration	Listen to samples of a capella music
I did something similar to this with the second class a few months ago during a make-up class, but that class still got a lot out of this exercise, as none remembered the term "a capella." I played a number of songs, asking the students to describe the non-vocal things that they were hearing. For some personal fun, I got to play "The Longest Time" by Billy Joel for a bit -- no student knew the song, but they had fun singing along with it. I ended the exercise playing Flight of the Bumblebee by Yo Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin - not an a capella song, but one that shows the power of a voice imitating an instrument, or nature.
More Rhythm charts	Introduce a rest
One of the songs that I played was Ladysmith Black Mambazo's rendition of Old MacDonald Had A Farm, partially in Zulu. I asked the students what the rhythm to the first measure of the song was - EEEEEEQ(nothing)! What was that nothing - why, it's a rest! It was a rest that took the same time as a quarter note, and thus it had to be a quarter rest. At this point, I started singing short/long or ti/ta to the tune of Old MacDonald, up to the EIEIO, thus blending pitch with rhythm. I then started flipping through rhythms on paper, this time with those that had a combination of quarter notes and quarter rests: QQRQ QRQR RQRQ That last rhythm, with a rest on the 1st beat, turned out to be pretty hard for the students to get used to. I also started adding eighth notes: EEEEREE EEREER QEERQ EEQREE EEEEQR Going back to the notion that each paper was a measure, I had a 2-measure pattern prepared for them: QEEQQRQQR I had the students try it out a few times, and a few eventually realized that it was a pattern for Shave and a Haircut.

I ended the first class with the Union Chant. The second class had a little extra time at the end, and they were really asking hard to do the "can" song, and so we sang as much of the Rattling Can as we could before the bell rang.

Today's class was quite wonderful - both classes were well behaved, and although there was some adjustment for all of us, I think the classes went well. When I'm teaching in the classroom, I don't have all of the instruments at my disposal, and so I have to be more selective as to what equipment to bring. But, this was indeed a really fun experience, and if construction continues to be loud after lunch, I'll likely find myself over by the classrooms again.