"Quiet Music"

My district is in the midst of The Big State Test. Literally every space in my school needs to be used for testing, including the room right next to the music room with a thin wall in between. Much of the next few weeks will be spent doing "quiet music class". Yes, music class is not normally a quiet thing. My students always point out to me that music is sound and sound isn't quiet. We all agree it's not our favorite, but it's necessary for the good of the school overall. If it's really nice I try to take students outside, but the gnats and rain have been keeping us in and quiet most of the time. Singing as a whole class can sometimes be quiet enough, but no students playing instruments and low amounts of rambunctiousness are required. Here's a few "quiet music" activities I use with my students:

For upper elementary:

Articles and questions about musicians

I don't do a lot of teaching "about" musicians, so this is a good way (along with sub plans) to squeeze in some contextual information. NewsELA is a great source of articles with pre-written questions, and they have musicians from a wide variety of genres. This year, my students are reading an article about Esperanza Spalding, and one about Lauryn Hill. Once they complete both, they will compare and contrast the two musicians based on what they read in the article.

Videos

I'm typically not one to show a lot of long videos, but quiet music time I am a little more open to using them to keep students engaged, learning and quiet. It's also a really good break for students who have tested earlier in the day and are totally fried. This week, I've been showing a walkthrough of the Benning Violin Factory by Music Express to my students. It's a relatively short video but has led to good discussions about the different string instruments and about careers in music beyond teaching and performance. You can find the video on YouTube here. There are similar videos for other families of instruments, and Music Express also has a video series of composer interviews that are quite good.

For lower elementary:

Echo songs and patterns

For whatever reason, I find my students are able to control their singing volume more effectively when they are echoing rather than singing a song that they already know. The Feierabend book of echo songs is great for this purpose, as are simple tonal and rhythmic patterns. I also challenge students to echo sing a pattern I play quietly on an instrument, which helps them hear and respond to pitch across different timbres.

Move Its

I adore the Move-It DVD! It's a lifesaver when my voice is shot or I otherwise need 2 minutes of engaged focus from younger students. It's especially great when we have to be quiet, since silence is part of my pre-existing procedures for move-its and many of the songs are slower and more relaxing. I'll often do this to settle a class back down if they start to get overexcited and a bit noisy.

Singing Games

Some of my classes enjoy the challenge of staying quiet enough to keep playing a preferred singing game. I always warn them that if they get noisy the game has to stop right away since we want the students testing to be able to focus and do their best work. Usually even the chattiest or most rambunctious class can keep themselves together for five or ten minutes to do a game they really love. Obviously, I don't use games with running or major competitions to set students up for success in staying quiet. Acka Backa, Doggie Doggie, and similar games tend to work well for me.

Quiet music class is definitely not ideal, but when it has to happen there certainly are a variety of options that allow students to keep learning music. I'll definitely be glad when testing season is over and we can bring out the xylophones and drums again! 

Lesson Share: The Playlist Project

This post was inspired by the #popmused chat on Twitter, with a question asking about popular music lesson plans. Check out the hashtag here - there's lots of great resources!

I was desperate for lessons without much teacher talk last spring, my voice was shot and allergies were making me struggle, but not be sick enough to call out. My "playlist project" was born when I found a bunch of old mix "tapes" (well, CDs) I had made when I was younger... it was so cool to find songs that went together and tweak the list until it was perfect, then burn it to a CD. Tapes became CDs, and now almost all playlists are virtual, so my students were able to put together a playlist however they wanted.

My students have different levels of background knowledge, so I spent quite a bit of time talking about playlists - what they are, how to put them together, differences between playlists and albums, etc. - and showing a few examples. Then I set my students free to create their own. I was intentionally vague about how the songs on the playlist should be related, but left it up to them how the songs were related. Some great examples students came up with included songs with loud drums (which included rock, hip-hop, and classical music), songs with Spanish lyrics, songs learned on piano, and songs about broken hearts. I used this worksheet to structure students' creating. They used iPads to look up songs as needed, since many of them weren't sure about exact titles or spelling of artist names. Because my school is fairly conservative about language and I wanted my students to have as much freedom as I could give them, the guideline I gave was that the titles and artist names had to be clean, but I wouldn't go searching for inappropriate lyrics.

This project served multiple purposes. For one, it got my students thinking deeply about the music they hear outside of school. It gave me insight into how they think about music, and what music they're exposed to. I was surprised at the number of songs from the 70s and 80s on their playlists, but glad to know that they appreciated and knew some of my favorites. I pulled from their playlists when I could - whether it was for beat-keeping practice or a little movement exploration (always vetting the songs first, of course). I did this late in the year last year, but I'm hoping to do it earlier in the year this year since it helped me build a relationship with my students and understand their musical world.

Feel free to make a copy of the worksheet and use if you'd like!

Planning with Post-Its

I enjoy lesson planning in the abstract, thing-about-it, daydreaming kind of way, but I've never had a way that I can really write down my plans that I love. Thankfully I'm not required to turn in plans or write full-blown,  multi-page formal lesson plans like I did when student teaching... but I still like to have things planned in a way that I can use them and also have space to write down what I actually accomplished with each class in my plan book. I like both a pre-written plan and a reminder of what we got done. This becomes extra tricky because I use the same plan for multiple classes of the same grade level, but might get to different points in the lesson with each class. Enter my new plan book and post its!

I decided to treat myself to a new planner at Michael's this year rather than going crazy trying to make my own sheets. I chose The Big Happy Planner: Teacher Edition.

First, I have to say it: this planner is so cute! It's also really functional, I promise. Before I started going crazy with post its it looked like this:

The weekly view is where I'm planning to use post-its to plan lessons. I cut a bunch of post-its to the size of the boxes. I used the August pages as placeholders for the post-its since I won't teach in August. Each color will be one week's lessons, I made enough for each grade level in each week:

My plan is to use each week of post-its to write my plans on for each class for that week. I labelled them so they don't get mixed up, writing the grade level and the lesson number.

My plan is to stick the post-it on the first time I have to teach that lesson. For example, here's the first week:

What's super nice about this set-up is that I can just move the post-it when I'm done teaching the lesson and write what we actually did in the box so I can refer back to it later. I'll be moving the post-its forward to the next time I need to teach the lesson. What's really handy about this is that sometimes when we have days off of school I don't see a class and have to use a previous lesson with them - now I'll have the post-it on their spot in my planner to remind me. Believe it or not, I'll still be using my first week lessons on September 17th thanks to 2 Monday holidays in a row, so there will be a lot of lessons to keep straight the first month of school. I plan to keep the post-its after I'm done using them so I can refer to them in the future (past plan books help me keep my sanity and improve my pacing).

That's how I'm planning with post-its this year! Hopefully it works well, I'll try to remember to write an update once I've used it a little bit. So far I love the Happy Planner!