Teaching Notes, 20140305

Last week’s classes resulted in one very challenging class and one that was easier, and there was a clear difference in the amount of material covered between the two. This time, I had a different strategy - try to cover as much material as quickly as possible with the first class that they missed out on, and then try newer material in the 2nd class. Going back to training, kinders tend to do better when shorter amounts of time are spent on the same topic, and that translates usually to many more different activities.

Similar to last week, I’ll cover the first class first. Here’s what happened.

Clap Patterns	Have students echo-clap me while they arrive on the carpet
The first class tends to slowly drift over to the carpeted area, and this time was no different. I didn’t want to do something big with only a subset of the students ready, and so I did simple echo claps while the students gathered. I started with 4 beat patterns, and mixed in some knee taps with the claps. Then, I moved to a 6-beat frame, and then an 8-beat frame. I wanted to revisit this later, and so when most of the students were on the carpet, I moved to the next activity.
Down By The Sea	Review movements, move to song
Without introducing the song, I started having the students follow me in the motions featured in the song. When we went through them all (except the falling into bed asleep motion), I started the song, and we then followed through with the motions with the song in the background. Just about everyone remembered the song once it started playing, and similar to the past time we did this, the students had a good time with this. Since the first class has a history of being more difficult to control, there was some worry that they’d go a little nutty this early in the music lesson, but the students did a good job containing their over-exuberance, particularly after the song had ended.
1-2-Tie My Shoe	Have students follow in silence, and then with the chant
I started out by doing the motions in silence, and students started trying to follow me. Most eventually figured out what I was doing, and they were saying the chant, although they were also still struggling to keep up. I prefer to use ASL signs for the numbers, and with 1-5 it’s straightforward, but this time, I signed 6-10 using two hands for simplicity. I would later tell the students that they were learning American Sign Language, and I even told them how ASL’s “3” was different from ASL’s “w”. I also end 9-10 with “do it again”, which I also taught in ASL. Eventually, I don’t need to chant anymore, and I continued to sign through the pattern with the students chanting. I end this with replacing the signs with “do it again” with “a big fat hen”, and when I did this, I got a lot of confused looks. I then did 9-10 one more time and then told them “a big fat hen” which of course made them laugh. We ended this activity with one more rendition through the pattern, ending with the big fan hen.
If You’ve Got 1	Review, introduce the very end of the song
Two weeks ago, the students followed me well in learning the movements for this song, but the class was too disruptive for me to try the very last part of the song. This time, after I walked through the students without the recording, I had them practice the very end of the song, including the two responses of 1-2-3/un deus trois. The little bit of French allowed me to inform the students that they knew English, Chinese, Spanish (for some), ASL, and now French. (Students were very happy to point out that they knew Spanish, a language that many know from home but doesn’t really get used much at the school.) With the students prepared, I started the recording, and the students kept up quite well. At the ending of the song I lost probably half the class, but they weren’t distracted by anything; they were still intently trying to hear the song and do the right thing. Yay.
Echo Clapping Revisited	Revisit clapping patterns, and then go into some fixed patterns
I got the students quickly back into echoing 8-beat patterns, and then I had them clap a pattern of 7 knee taps followed by a single clap. I had preprinted some note patterns with some notes with low stems vs. high stems, and I then showed the students a picture of 7 high stem notes (low heads) with an 8th low stem note (high head). I asked the students if anyone saw something different “things” on the page, and students were eager to tell me that the circles were high or low (using an amusing assortment of descriptions). I then walked them through a few different patterns that I had printed on paper. I also had a few patterns with rests, but I could tell that the students were nearing their attention span limit with this activity (possibly because it was already past the 20th minute, or possibly because I already had them do some echo clapping), and so I moved on.
Deep And Wide	Review and eliminate word(s)
I started mimicking the movements and the students very slowly started to follow me. When I had more than half following, I started singing Deep and Wide. The students followed ok; they clearly were starting to lose a bit of focus, but I still had the students try to eliminate “wide”. Similar to the second class during the previous class, students struggled a bit to not sing the words, and in order to emphasize the silence, I had them cover their mouths on “wide”. That seemed to help a bit more. The students nonetheless had fun with the song and the attempt to skip a word. I didn’t extend this any further, and we were able to squeeze two iterations with no “wide” before it was time for recess.

The second class worked a little differently. We started with echo clapping, 1-2 Tie My Shoe, followed by If You’ve Got 1, followed by Deep and Wide. Deep and Wide was a bit more successful compared to the previous time I had taught it to the second class, and we even tried eliminating “river”, which was quite a challenge. The last two activities were new…

My Bonnie	Teach song, get kids to clap in 3s
I started singing the song, and many of the kids immediately started singing along even though I hadn’t taught the song before. After one time through the stanza, I repeated the stanza, but I had the students tap their knees at the first beat of each measure. We sang through the stanza and the chorus with the taps, and then I had the students try to do a tap-clap-clap pattern while singing. This is quite a challenge for students, particularly for the few students who didn’t know the song before, and so I encouraged the students to just worry about the tapping and clapping, and not to worry about the singing. I also had to slow the song down significantly so that the students could keep up with the percussion. br> Next, I had the students count to three as we kept up the tap-clap-clap pattern. I reminded the students that usually we had been counting to 4, and earlier during the echo clapping we had also counted to 6 and 8. However, this time, we were counting to three, and that seemed to click in a bit with the students.
Penguins Attention	Teach songs and movements
This was a fun activity that I learned from a past workshop led by Sanna Longden. It involves a quick call-and-answer chant (one line each), followed by a short, whimsical song. The idea was that the students would follow my motions (which were flapping an arm, leg, etc. like a penguin, or waddling like a penguin), and they had to pay attention each time. Not a lot of students picked up on the song, but they were happy to mimic the motions. I tried to keep the motions not too exaggerated since we still had limited space inside the classroom. I eventually started to choose individual students to be the leader, which worked to a point. The first few motions were copied, but eventually the rest of the class wanted to really get a close look at what the leader-student was doing, and that got a little intimidating for the leader-student. Even when I asked the students to move back, they crept up because at that age, everyone is short! I realized that it was easy for them to follow me because I was so much taller than they were, but to have 24 kindergarteners follow a single one is challenging unless the single one is on an elevated location. Eventually, I had the other parent in the room be the leader so that the students could see what motions were to be done easily and without needing to crowd another little one.

Both classes worked pretty well, and I think it helped that I switched topics so many times. I had forgotten about the need to switch frequently, even if the students were doing well with a particular activity. The frequent changes kept their attention better, and so I’ll have to keep that in mind for future classes. The great thing is that you don’t have to do a whole lot for each activity.