Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

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!

country-crossing

I am back to work today preparing to welcome a whole new crop of preschoolers into the music room.   This year I am participating in a 21st Century Classroom program sponsored by my school division and as a result I will be getting access to a lot of instructional technology resources.  I am trying to create a lot of SMART Notebook files and things I can use with my Interwrite pad.

I created this SMART Notebook to assist my students with matching instruments to the sounds contained in the book Country Crossing by Jim Aylesworth.  This book is an old-fashioned story of a car reaching a railroad crossing in the quiet woods and the sounds of the train speeding by.  I use the book in a small unit about trains I do while the classroom teachers are focusing on transportation.

There are many great train songs in the Kindergarten Making Music textbook and I use many of them during this unit including “Mbombera”, “Little Trains” and The Little Train of the Caipira. My students have always LOVED The Little Train of Caipira and I have often brought it back out during the year for a reward and allowed the children to play instruments along with it.

The train unit it particularly useful for practicing different tempos and the feeling of speeding up and slowing down.  We talk about how a train has to start slow and then get faster and faster, and how it has to gradually slow down before it gets to the station.  Many of the train songs I’ve mentioned here begin with an accelerando and end with a ritardando to imitate the feeling of a train.

As a result of some talk on the teachers.net music forum I have started a wiki for music teachers to share SMART Notebooks and other digital creations they use in the classroom.  It seems that SMART Boards are becoming particularly popular in music classroom (where the financial investment makes sense, since the music classroom typically serves every student in a school) and many of us are reinventing the wheel by creating lesson materials our colleagues around the country have already produced.  This wiki is intended to be a place to share with each other in order to make all of our lives easier and all of our teaching more effective and efficient.

The wiki is still in the early stages but we have already had some TERRIFIC contributions.  If you would like to contribute please get in touch with me so I can put you on the list!

mustech.pbwiki.com

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

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.