Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

There are always a ton of tech questions on the Teachers.net music teachers chatboard, and recently one came up regarding transferring sounds from casette tapes to computer files and/or CD’s.  I’m sure many of us have recordings of concerts or other things from “the old days” that we would enjoy having available in a more permanent and convenient form.  Fortunately if you have some basic computer skills it is easy and inexpensive to transfer those casettes to your computer with materials you can buy at RadioShack.

Rather than reinvent the wheel myself I am going to direct your attention to this excellent tech-help blog where the writer has created a really helpful, detailed tutorial with photos and screen caps on how to accomplish this task using a PC and the free program Audacity (if you are using a Mac this is also possible with GarageBand.)

Basically if you have a sound card with an audio-input jack (usually blue, if you have a MacBook it is the one next to your headphone jack marked with the symbol that looks like a circle flanked by inward-pointing triangles,) a casette player with any kind of output (in the tutorial he uses RCA but this is just as possible with an 1/8″ headphone jack, although of course the resulting audio quality will vary) and a cord that can go between the two you can make this happen!

You do not need a special machine to accomplish this task!! Those things are available and if your afraid of your computer they might be easier, but they sure are going to be more expensive!

I don’t like to show too many videos in my classes. It seems to me that students experience such limited music instruction in their school life, we shouldn’t waste even a single second!!! That being said, there are times when I find a short (10-15 minute) video that reinforces a musical concept AND sometimes ties in a cross-curricular concept in a way that I can’t. Sometimes those moving pictures just depict a building site so much better than I can no matter how crazy I get acting out!! We have 45 minute music lessons so I feel that giving over 10-15 minutes to a video does not sacrifice too much time for singing, playing instruments and otherwise MAKING music as is our primary focus. Additionally there are of course those times when I have to be out and face the dilemma of creating plans for substitute teacher who is likely NOT a musician.

To that end I make a lot of use of United Streaming, which my school subscribes to. If you are not familiar with United Streaming (AKA Discovery Education) the Discovery channel has collected a set of educational videos for various ages and subjects and made them available to teachers. Many of them even come with curriculum guides or follow up materials.

In my exploration of United Streaming a stumbled across a set of five short (15 minute) videos that appear to be a series once produced in the UK called “Stop Look Listen: Okey Cokey Karaoke!” The premise is a woman named Okey Cokey who lives in a magical karaoke machine. Each episode introduces a song, often a story-song, and leads the students through several games and activities that explore the song. The show has sections where Okey Cokey leads a game or activity as well as sections in which different instructors speak with a group of children about different things, and you see the children interact and come up with ideas on how to act things out. Each episode emphasizes a different basic musical concept that is appropriate for Pre-K or Kindergarten. Among other things the series discusses echoes, fast and slow, high and low (including those important vocal sirens!) as well as drama and movement concepts that go along with the songs. Each episode ends with another full performance of the song including the student-participation elements that have been developed during the episode.

My students find these videos engaging and I find them to be an excellent use of our music time. They do a fabulous job reinforcing our musical concepts and also pull in other parts of the pre-K curriculum. If there is a drawback it is that all of the actors have heavy British accents, but my students do not even seem to notice.

You can show United Streaming videos using your computer hooked to a television (increasingly easy with new laptops possessing S-Video connections and new TV’s often having VGA input) or using an LCD projector (children always love watching on the big screen!)

ETA: I forgot to mention that the Okey Cokey videos contain many opportunities for the children watching to create music by singing, creating vocal accompaniments, etc.  Audience participation is a key element for me in deciding whether a video is worth spending our music time on.

I strongly believe that incorporating school events and themes into the music classroom is important, particularly at the primary level.  It is good for the kids, reinforces their learning across the curriculum, builds positive relationships between music teachers and their colleagues and, lets face it, makes everyone look good to the boss.  That being said it is just as important to make sure that we are not subordinating music objectives to other objectives.  After all in every school I have ever worked in or even heard of students get FAR more time studying math, language arts, science and social studies than they do music.

Today, of course, is Earth day, a holiday I feel very strongly about.  I consider myself an environmentalist and try to instill the values of good environmental stewardship in people around me (of all ages!)  Today we did an activity to acknowledge Earth day that is something I usually do anyway, I just tweaked it a tiny bit by briefly allowing the children to tell me what Earth day is about and things we can do to take care of the earth.  I worked them around to how planting a garden is a nice way to care for the earth and then we did the activity “Digging Up a Hole” from one of my VERY favorite books, 101 Rhythm Instrument Activities for Young Children by Abigail Flesch Connors.

This is an activity using shakers in which students sing about and pantomime the various stages of planting a garden starting with “digging up a hole” and ending with “plant is gonna grow”, set to “Dinah Won’t You Blow”.  For the sake of Ms. Connors’s copyright I won’t go into the details of each verse but hopefully you get the idea!  It is one of these wonderful piggyback songs that students pick up very quickly because the words are mostly repeated over and over.  At the end I let each child tell me what he or she grew before putting the shaker away in the bag.

I really think we can satisfy our supervisors by incorporating non-musical objectives without making music secondary in our classroom.  I am very stubborn and feel strongly about children’s need for music education so believe me when I tell you musical objectives are always on the front burner for me.  That doesn’t mean I have to be SO stubborn that I refuse to work other things in along the way!

I looooove podcasts.  They are perfect for the car, or the treadmill, or to listen to while knitting.  Most of my favorites are from NPR (This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, The Splendid Table.)

I also love music and love technology, so imagine how much a L-O-V-E something that combines all three!!  Carol Broos (twitter) and Brenda Muench (twitter) are both wonderful people to follow around the internet if you are interested in edtech, particularly as it applies to music.  The two have joined forces to host a podcast called Musically and Technically Speaking where they share some of their wonderful ideas and techniques.  What I like about these ladies from the podcast as well as their blogs and forum postings is that they are really into good teaching, not just toys.  This is not “what can I do to find an excuse to use technology” it is “how can I use technology to enhance what I am doing.”  I think the distinction is very, very important.

As a side note as a fulltime pre-K music teacher I’d like to empathize with whichever one of the ladies said, referring to kindergartners, “I just have a hard time dealing with them sometimes.”  So true, they really are a different ball of wax.  In my own times of frustration it is comforting to know that I am not the only one who sometimes feels as if I am herding cats.

So if your interested in good teaching, music and educational technology go ahead and throw this podcast on while you commute or do the dishes.  I don’t think you’ll regret it!

One of my favorite things about teaching preschool music is that the skills we explore are very fundamental. I feel this open sup the possibility for all sorts of play-based learning and I get to do a lot of fun things with the kids. At the moment we are “working” on the concept of loud and soft, which is obviously part of our music curriculum but also integrates the concept of opposites from the preschool curriculum.

Here are five activities we have been doing to work on loud and soft:

1. Grizzly Bear - If this doesn’t fall under the category of a classic I don’t know what does. This is a song from my Silver Burdett Making Music Kindergarten book (and most other basal textbooks, I’m sure) in which the students sing quietly about a bear sleeping in a cave, then shout the last word (”MAD!”) I love this song because when the students sing “quietly” it often is the best light singing voice I hear all year. Also it gives us the opportunity to play a really fun game. I have a large cardboard box in my room and the children take turns hiding in the box (or “bear cave”) while the others tiptoe around a circle (we stay OUTSIDE the edge of our circle carpet… otherwise they all crowd in around the box) and sing the song. At the end the students in the circle shout “MAD!” and the student playing the bear pops out of the box and roars. I get sick of this game waaaay before they do!
2. Lullabies - Another part of my preschool music curriculum is recognizing lullabies. This honestly does not take a lot of work for most kids once I explain that a lullabye is a special song we sing to help someone go to sleep. Tying into this is number 3…
3. Bean bag babies - After we talk about lullabies we get out the beanbags and pretend they are babies. We rock them gently while we listen to a lullabye. Then we do an activity that I got from 101 Rhythm Instrument Activities to the tune of London Bridge is Falling down
   “Little baby go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep
   Little baby go to sleep, little baby.”
   The “babies” then proceed to start to crawl, walk, run, jump, etc and we talk about how eventually babies get to be kids and being a kid is fun because you can do all sorts of things babies can’t. This is another preschool curriculum connection as one of the science curriculum objectives is for the kids to understand how people start as babies and mature through childhood into adulthood.
4. Animal Opposites - With a 45 minute music class on a three day rotation I have a lot of time with the kids (yay!) and I confess I sometimes use a bit of it to read books. I know that there has not been a strong connection demonstrated between children’s literature and music achievement, but its an activity I like anyway. I found a great one in our library called Animal Opposites: Loud and Quiet that is part of a series. The book goes through several pairs of animals that are loud and quiet. This gives the kids a chance to make animal sounds which are good for loud and soft as well as high and low.
5. Bert and Ernie: Loud and Soft - If you’ve never seen these Sesame Street All About Music books you need to get yourself to Amazon right now. They are very old school but the kids love them and they are fun. The stories are simple and there are LOTS of extra things in the pictures to talk about.

This turned out to be a long post for a simple 5 things. Anyone have any suggestions on more activities for exploring loud and quiet?

I am sad to have been away from my blog for so long!! We have had a lot going on at school including a round of layoffs (I was spared, my division is trying hard to maintain fine arts positions which is a blessing in so many ways) an a week’s worth of screening for incoming preschoolers (we use the Speed DIAL test and we ALL have to help do it!)  As a result of the screening we gave a “performance” tonight even though we haven’t had music class since week before last!!  It was rather stressful but I keep things VERY simple for my little pre-K’s anyway so we all came through alive!!

Because of the screening we had to delay our celebration of Dr Seuss’s birthday until Friday of this week (we let the kids wear PJ’s an it just didn’t seem like a good idea with the schedule all messed up and a bunch of visitors in the building!) I am looking forward to sharing some of the SMART Notebook files I just found on the SMART Board Revolution Ning with our classroom teachers!

http://smartboardrevolution.ning.com/group/prekkindergarten1st2ndgrade/forum/topics/dr-seuss-notebook-lessons

If you have a SMART board (or other IWB, as often you can import files) I recommend the SMART board revolution Ning heartily!!

things like this (taken from an online forum for teachers that shall remain nameless):

Hi- I have a student who does not like to sit… at group
time or at desk… not really able to focus and
participate…I am not sure what to do because I have the
rest of the students to teach…..

Maybe I am just hanging onto my idealism but this attitude really bugs me (and not just because of the ellipses abuse.)  Yes, you have many other students to teach.  You also have to find a way to teach won’t-sit-down kid.  That is your job!  How can we claim that we wanted to be respected (and paid) as professionals when so many of us wash our hands of a child as soon as we encounter a roadblock?  Yes, some children are difficult.  Even more so some combinations of children are difficult, but that doesn’t change the fact that we must teach them (or at the very least end the year trying.)

The fact that a particular student is difficult does not absolve us of responsibility for him.  Am I unrealistic to feel this way?  Are there times when you just have to give up on one kid to focus on the others?

Everybody loves to play Jeopardy-style review games, and I can’t tell you how many teachers I know who are still taping index cards to the wall for this.  There are techie ways to play but there has never been one as easy as Jeopardy Labs.  My ITRT friend turned me onto it with a post from her blog and I wanted to share, because really I think almost anyone can take advantage of this great tool.

I received a blog comment that reminded me I have been meaning to blog about the new PBS Kids series, “Lomax, the Hound of Music”.

I have never met a John Feierabend material I didn’t love.  I use the First Steps in Music curriculum  devotedly in my classes and it has really improved the quality of teaching and learning in my room.  I was very excited when I heard Mr. Feierabend was involved in a children’s television series.

Unfortunately my local PBS stations have not begun carrying the show, although I hope they will (I sent them an email, if you have in SE Virginia won’t you please send them one too? info@whro.org)  I have had a chance to explore the website, which has some wonderful interactive games and some great videos from the series.  From what I can tell the show is exactly the high quality program I would expect from something with the Feierabend name on it.  The songs are the kind of high-quality American folk songs our children need to be learning and they are presented in a fun, interactive way.  I have shown one of the videos (Bill Grogan’s Goat) to my students because we happen to be learning that song and they really enjoy the style of the series.

Check it out yourself and if it looks good to you please lobby your PBS station to pick it up.  I hope we can enjoy this show for years to come (and I REALLY REALLY hope that Sirius Thinking will make a DVD release!!)

Those of us who teach music are well aware of the power to transform an individual. I have seen music keep children in school and out of trouble over and over. Billy Bragg is taking that effect outside the schools by using guitars as a tool to rehabilitate prison inmates in the UK.

I love this idea. People who break the law do need to be punished, but I think we are over-focused on punishment in this society (not only in the justice system but in the education system as well.) We need to be more focused on creative ways to help children and adults stay OUT of trouble in the future. It is painfully clear that we have a damaging cycle that is difficult for our students and inmates to break.

The short video available on the guardian.uk site is well worth watching.