Exciting!!
I am quoted (briefly) in the August edition of Teaching Music magazine in the article on Interactive White Boards. It’s not a huge quote or anything, but it sure was exciting for lil ole me!!
Archive forSeptember, 2008
Best places to find clipart
Teaching at the pre-school level I spend a LOT of time looking for the perfect piece of clipart to illustrate a point. Since my students don’t have a lot of reading skills a picture can help a lot when trying to communicate classroom rules or concepts.
Google Image Search is always a good place to look for pictures, although sometimes there are simply too many results to sift through before finding the right thing. I have also used the clipart libraries that came with my Smart Notebook software as well as the one included with a wonderful program called Pixie (as an aside Tech4learning is a wonderful company and I am told they even keep artists on staff to draw things that teachers request!)
In my opinion the absolute best online clipart library is the one at Discovery Education. They have a really good collection and the style of the drawing is very appropriate for my students (simple, clear lines, not a lot of distracting background.) They even have the all-important criss-cross applesauce!
Simple little doohicky for music exploration
I am a member of VSTE (Virginia Society for Technology in Education) which is a free organization. I also follow VSTE on Twitter, and that’s how I found out about this cool little thing on the PBS website. It allows one to experiment with the length and width of strings and to arrange different strings to create a composition. It is very IWB friendly and would also be a good exploration activity in a lab setting (although I don’t think it would hold kids for a whole class period, it might work well as “bell work”.)
Enjoy!
Three Times Around Went Our Gallant Ship
I am trying not to be a delinquent blogger, although my life got a lot more hectic with the onset of music classes yesterday. I have completely forgotten since the beginning of last year that pre-schoolers know NOTHING in September. In the beginning of the year we work a lot on rules, moving around safely, etc. I like to do some songs they already know so we’ve been singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and the “ABC Song” as well as some material from the first lesson in First Steps in Music: Preschool and Beyond. “Chop Chop Chippity Chop” is always a big hit. We say the rhyme and make a chopping on the beat motion, then I let the kids take turns suggesting things to put into the “soup”. We make a big deal about tasting it at the end and I ask them to “show me with their faces” how it tasted. At the beginning of the year they all just copy me, but within a few lessons they normally adopt a hilarious variety of facial expressions.
Speaking of hilarious and having fun I ran across this short audio clip from last year that put a big smile on my face this morning. Towards the end of the year we learning the song “Our Gallant Ship” and talked about AB patterns, singing versus speaking, when the students did and did not hear an accompaniment, etc. Then we busted out the parachute and had a great time playing with it while we sang the song. This clip does not represent the world’s most amazing preschool singing, but I think it does capture the enormous amount of fun we had doing this lesson and it made my day to have such a strong reminder of how great teaching preschool music is!
Whiteboard Challenge Week 2
The second challenge in the Whiteboard Challenge is about using cloning. I create a three-page SMART Notebook to help students learn the simple song “Bernie Bee” which is a traditional so-mi song.
On the first page the iconic notation (small and large bees) are already in place and students can drag ta’s and ti-ti’s (or whatever you call them in your room) to match up with the bees.
On the second page students have to place both the bees and the stick notation.
On the third page students place the bees and stick notation again, but I have added a single staff line so that they can show which sounds are high (so) and which are low (mi.)
I created the background in a simple image program called Pixie 2.
Whiteboard Challenge Week 1
Because one of my goals this year is to use the Interactive Whiteboard more often I am taking part in the Whiteboard Challenge. If you have not heard about it already it is a 14 week project consisting of 7 “challenges” to create Notebook files demonstrating specific features. It is for all IWB users, not just Smartboard. I have part-time access to a Smartboard (we share in our whole building between about 16 teachers. The librarian and I are basically the only ones who use it) but full-time access to an Interwrite pad, so its possible some of my IWB activities will be executed on an interactive pad instead.
The first challenge is about recording MP3’s and putting them into your notebook. To satisfy this challenge I present a lesson I created to go along with a book we read in class called Country Crossing. The book contains all sorts of cool sound effects and the kids love to pair instruments with different things and then play along with the book. I used Garageband to record the instrument sounds.
You can read more about how I use this lesson in a post below specifically about it.
