Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

Ever since I was a young child walking around the block to the library I have gotten a huge amount of enjoyment out of beautiful picture books. My joy persisted through my high school and college years working in a lovely independent bookstore and into my career as a music teacher. There are several picture books I routinely use in my classroom (such as Tom Paxton’s wonderful book Going to the Zoo) and even more that I wish I could work in (such as the beautiful book that goes with John Denver’s beautiful song Sunshine on my Shoulders.)

For those who also live children’s book in the classroom or at home there are several new picture books out recently that illustrate classic children’s songs. Many of them also come with CD’s. The two I am most interested in are the NEW version of The Marvelous Toy by Tom Paxton and Peter Yarrow’s Day is Done, which comes with a CD on which he sings with his daughter.

When you put beautiful words and music together with beautiful pictures the result is magical. These books are assembled with all of the love and care we would expect from men who have put so much passion and energy into their music over such long careers.

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!!)

Animoto (the remarkable website that takes your photos and your sound files and puts them together into impressive-looking music videos) is making a generous offer to educators.  They are offering teachers (AND their students) the chance to make full-length videos for free (the general public has to pay for videos over 30 seconds.)

Besides the fact that its just plain cool, there are tons of ways to use this in a teaching setting.  For example maybe you’re working with pre-schoolers on beginning letter sounds.  You can combine a song (or ANY kind of audio track, perhaps a recording of your precious little ones brainstorming “things that begin with the letter ‘t’”?) with a collection of photos of those things.  The advantage to Animoto over, say, a slideshow created in iPhoto is that the final product is incredibly visually interesting, much more so than a simple slide show, and it coordinates beautifully with the music.  Basically you get a genius-looking video without doing any of the work.

If you would like to take advantage of Animoto’s generosity proceed to:

http://education.animoto.com/

Click here to see a sample of what Animoto can do… these are photos from the trip to the zoo I took with my husband.

Going to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo

It’s no secret that the invention of the mp3 player made the average music teacher’s life enormously easier.  Most of us work off of numerous CD’s not only from our basal textbooks but from any number of supplemental resources.  An iPod or other brand of mp3 player can put all of those things together in one place for relatively little money considering how long they last and the benefit to teaching and learning.

I have resisted the use of an iPod in the classroom myself and instead use my Macbook, mostly for these two reasons: 1) the school provides the Macbook and 2) the Macbook has this delightful thing called Frontrow that works with an Infrared remote.

Well, this coming year I am taking part in a 21st Century Classroom program and have been provided with an iPod to use at school (in addition to my Macbook, my cup runneth over.)  While this is nice I am far too spoiled by my remote to give it up so I was browsing at the Apple store today and found two excellent options for people who want to use iPods but also want the convenience and flexibility of remote control.

The first is a docking station with speakers for about $130. It has a remote and is made by a good company (Logitech) and has excellent reviews everywhere I’ve looked.

This is a great product but if you’re using an iPod already you’ve probably either already got speakers if you’ve got it plugged into a boombox, and maybe you don’t want to drop that much money to duplicate equipment.  In that case I reccomend the Apple Universal Dock which, for $49, simply adds remote control capability to your iPod and allows you to continue using whatever speakers you like.  This is the frontrunner for me as I already have a speaker setup I’m in love with.

If you don’t have an iPod to use in your classroom, I highly reccomend getting one.  For a few hundred bucks (chump change compared to the total budget of your school system) you can make your life exponentially easier.  They’re easy to use and there’s no concerns about scratching, skipping etc.  Ask your principal, ask your technology department or try to find a grant (many local organizations such as a Kiwanis club will provide small grants for something like this.)

Happy Summer everybody!!! We are having a terrible heatwave that is making our last few days of school somewhat cranky and difficult.

Today I found this fun resource called Curriki (http://www.curriki.org/) which is packed with all sorts of instructional materials for all sorts of subjects.  I hope you are all using your vacation to relax and not work on school stuff, but if you do work a little maybe this will be something fun to explore.

The Smartboard activity is going GREAT. The kids really enjoy interacting with the board and the site I’m using provides just enough interaction for them to get their feet wet but not so much that we’re overwhelmed or have to spend ages giving directions.

One of the other things I’m doing this week is a shaker activity out of this wonderful book called 101 Rhythm Instrument Activities for Young Children.

I think of all the books I use in my classroom this is one of the ones I go to the most. It features a LOT of activities that are appropriate for my 4 and 5 year olds, using all sorts of rhythm instruments and incorporating some of their curriculum objectives as well. For example right now many of our classes are learning about eggs and seeds and the life cycle of animals and plants, so the shaker activity we did involved pretending to dig a hole, plant a seed and watch it grow. As we put our shakers away I let each child tell me what they “grew”… their imaginations are so impressive!!

Anyway, I’d be lost without this book. If you teach young children and you want to get them onto some simply rhythm instruments but aren’t sure what exactly to do, it would be a great investment.