I just finished my first week at my new school….and it was GREAT! It was such a joy to teach, everyday just flew by! For this first week, I made it my priority to create lessons that would allow my students to experience the joy of playing and making music together while also allowing me to model the expectations of my classroom. I also did some preparatory games and activities and was pleasantly surprised to find that most of my groups already have a good, solid foundation of music skills!
I struggled with deciding how I wanted my students to enter
and whether or not I wanted them to sit in the circle in any particular
way. I settled on having them enter and
follow me in a circle while I sang the first song and then once everyone was in
I just started the game by having them do what I was doing. In the past, I’ve always enjoyed greeting
everyone at the door, but I kinda wanted something new and I wanted my first
impression to the students to be that the music making begins as soon as they
enter the room. I think my students
enjoyed “getting down to business” right away and several of the classroom
teachers stopped me in the hall throughout the week to tell me how much fun it
looked!
So far, I am also loving my schedule! I see students in Kindergarten through 3rd
grade twice a week for thirty minutes (winds up being more like twenty-five
minutes) and students in 4th-6th twice a week for an
hour. In another week or two, the band
and strings teachers will create their instrumental lessons schedule and the
amount of time I see students in 4th-6th grade will
change. I have been used to teaching
half hour lessons and so I made a few small tweaks to the lesson template I
have been using and so far it has worked well in terms of lesson layout for my
younger students. Having hour long
classes with the older students is new to me, so I tried a couple different
combinations of activities this week, but I think I am settled on a template
that I will use. Here’s an example of a
first grade lesson I will teach next week:
And here's a fourth grade lesson:
What are you teaching next week? Do you have a template or layout for
activities that you typically follow when planning for your lessons? Leave me a comment and tell me all about
it! I will send everyone who comments on
this post a free editable file of the templates that I use!
Hope you have a fantastic weekend!
Ashley
