Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

As music teachers we all face the same struggle at the beginning of the year: having to learn ALL of those names.   Knowing the names of your students is very important for building a relationship with your students and classroom management.  Particularly here in the preschool building I have found that saying “John, please sit down” is much much much more effective than “Sweet heart, please sit down!”  It also pleases the students very much to be greeted by name in the morning during arrival.

My favorite trick for learning student names is to create a contact sheet in iPhoto on which photos of all students in one class are shown on one page, with their names underneath.  Most of the teachers I work with are taking head shots of their students for various reasons during the first few days of school anyway, and they are happy to share.  It is a small task to take pictures of the few classrooms that do not have them available.

Once I have the photos on my computer I create an album for each classroom in iPhoto.  I will also use these albums throughout the year to store any photos I take of music classroom activities.

When you create the contact sheet it is helpful for the student name to be displayed directly under the face.  iPhoto will print the name of the file underneath the photo in the contact sheet, so if you change the file name to the student’s name you will have a contact sheet on which names are printed under faces.

To do this click on any photo and then on the small “i” button at the bottom left of the iPhoto screen.  This will display photo information.  If you double click the information printed next to “title” you can enter the student’s name.  If you have friendly helpful teachers or assistants they might take the few minutes to help you with this.  Otherwise I find it a reasonable use of music class time on the first day, considering how much more efficiently I am able to learn names and consequentially conduct class!

Use the Info button to enter student names as the photo title.

Once you have entered all of the student’s names as titles you are ready to create your contact sheet.

Drag and select all of the photos you want to print on one page.

Drag to select all of the photos you want included in the proof sheet.

Click “File” and then select “Print”

File > Print

On the left side of the print screen select “Contact Sheet”

Click "Proof Sheet" on the left

The iPhoto default is to create a contact sheet with three columns.  For most classrooms that will not be enough to get all students on one page. If you want all students on one page you need to customize the number of columns on your contact sheet.

Underneath the preview area click the “Customize” button.

Click the customize button to add more columns and fit more photos onto a page.

On the resulting screen use the slider at the bottom to create more or less columns.  I usually use as may columns as it takes to get all students on one page.

Use the slider to add or subtract columns

Click the “Print” button (right next to the slider you were just using) and your contact sheet will arrive at the printer!

These are useful for seating charts as well as learning names.  I hope your school year is off to a great start!

This is something I have wished for basically every time i use a SMART Board file in my room. I always try to let as many kids have turns as possible, and I almost always have another class coming to do the same activity right after the last one.  I NEED a button to push that resets my pages back to their original state easily! Closing and reopening the file is just inconvenient, especially if you slip and save changes!

Click here to see a video tutorial on how to add reset buttons to Notebook pages.  Thanks to @jameshollis on Twitter for sharing the page with me!

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 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!!

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.

As I was looking through the IWB Challenge I happened across the SMART Notebook Lesson and Activity Toolkit.  This is a downloadable set of gallery items which DRAMATICALLY expand the functionality of your SMART Notebooks.  There is an activity for playing a memory-style tile game, matching, sorting and all kinds of activities that provide instant feedback on right or wrong answers to your students.  I still wish SMARTTech would get on board with something as simple and useful as Promethean’s containers, but I am really excited about the possibilities provided by the Lesson and Activity Toolkit.

I’m also embarrassed to admit I only JUST figured out that I can add my own objects to the gallery.  It’s too bad it took me so long to catch on, but just think how much easier my life just got!

I put off the IWB week 3 challenge for awhile first of all because I had a lot going on and second of all because I didn’t know how to do transparency and I thought it might take some effort to figure out.  I was wrong, it’s extremely simple and wonderful to be able to remove that pesky white space from around images!!

I am recycling the Transportation notebook I posted below as my week three challenge file.  Transparency is a wonderful, useful tool in the software!

Transportation Notebook with transparency

I have expanded my Country Crossing idea into a larger Transportation SMART Notebook.  I am still working on it and brainstorming to add some more pages, but i haven’t posted in awhile so I though I better share something!

Transportation SMART Notebook

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.

Bernie Bee SMART Notebook

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.

Country Crossing SMART Notebook