December Singalong!

I, like many music teachers, do more than just teach classes and put on concerts. One of my favorite school events is an all-school pajama day singalong right before December break. I teach K-5, so it's a wide range of ages to appeal to, and a diverse student population. Because I have students who cannot participate in anything holiday related due to religious beliefs, I try to keep the singalong primarily winter based, but represent Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa with one song explicitly about each holiday. That way, students who want to can sing about the holiday they celebrate, or another holiday, but those who cannot are still able to be included on songs about snow, penguins, and other non-holiday related fun. Rather than sit and sing, we add lots of movements and other fun activities to keep everyone engaged. I've built a few new traditions in my 3 years so far at my school, and it's always amazing to see the kids remember songs they've learned in years past.

I can't share my slides for all of the songs due to copyrighted lyrics, but here's a list of what we'll be doing for our singalong this year:

• Jingle Bells
• Sleigh Ride (we use the Pentatonix version)
• Do You Want to Build a Snowman from Frozen
• I Have a Little Dreidel
• Penguin Polka from Music K-8 (we stand up and dance while singing this one)
• Kwanzaa is Here
• Fur Elise winter movements (from the Feierabend Move It DVD)
• Snow Day! Snow Day! Hip Hip Hooray by Sally Albrecht and Jay Althouse
• Frosty the Snowman
• Rudolph
• When the Lights All Shine from Music K-8 (SHINE is our school rules/character building acronym and we do sitting choreography to this one)

Managing Huge School Events is a Breeze with ClassTag!

The biggest event of my school year has come and gone! October flew by since it was consumed by preparing for Cantonstock, a big music concert and fundraiser day that my school system puts on. As one of the music teachers, it's my Super Bowl. Getting information to all my students' families is essential to making the event happen. We need students to arrive at different times depending upon what groups they perform with, and need parent volunteers throughout the day to help. In addition, many students are trying to perform around sporting events and other commitments and require more detailed information on timing and logistics. ClassTag makes communicating all of that super easy!

First of all, ClassTag makes it easy to set up multiple classes. This is key for those of us who teach many different groups of students. Here's the list of classes I see in my account:

I'm able to separate out each section of my band, have a group for my Orff ensemble, and share a class that I co-teach with another teacher so we can both send out announcements and communicate with families. This is so much easier than many communication tools - no more email lists, confusing groups, or limit to the number of sections you can set up!

I was able to set up Cantonstock as an event for each of my classes. An event within ClassTag allows all the information regarding any sort of time-bound activity to be kept in one place. In addition to concerts and out-of-school events, I could see this being used to remind parents to return permission forms, or to help families remember days off school or special events like pajama day and field trips. It's really easy to create an event, and the form helps make it easy to remember to add all the details:

 ClassTag can even remind parents of events with weekly emails! It's also easy to schedule announcements about events (I set up everything in early October for an event in early November) in order to save time during those busy weeks while still keeping parents in the loop.

Events are just one feature of ClassTag, but it's a very useful one for sure. If you'd like to sign up and try it yourself, please consider using my link. Thanks for reading!

--I am a ClassTag ambassador. I receive ClassTag coins and referral incentives for sharing how I use ClassTag in my teaching, but really do believe in their service and think it's useful for teachers.