Music with Mrs. Nielsen

What? This is a game called 1, 2, 3 O'Leary. Students learned the song in a circle first, keeping a steady beat on their laps. I then showed them a pattern with a basketball (bounce, bounce, pass, catch). They repeated this pattern with each line. As students became more comfortable with the pattern, we added another ball, and another. Students were instructed to use a certain kind of pass (bounce pass, chest pass, overhead pass) depending on what color ball they had in order to prevent balls colliding in the air. So What? This activity took a simple song and added a high level of kinesthetic activity in order to demonstrate an understanding of the beat. It was a simple assessment for me to see which students were able to bounce a ball on the beat. I used basketballs because I was working with 5th graders in this particular lesson- if I had done this with younger grades, I would've used a softer ball. The basketballs also created some curiosity and interest- they were confu...

I don't have a lot to discuss this week. We did more Mallet Madness, and since it takes a full week to get through every one of my classes, not much was different from last week. I did a new book called "Once I caught a fish alive." All grades did this book, with varying levels of difficulty. Kindergarten: Played their instruments only on the words or only on the numbers. 1st grade: Played non-pitched on words, pitched on numbers. 2nd grade: Played non-pitched on words, pitched on numbers. 3rd grade: Experimented with the C Pentatonic scale up and down on numbers, non-pitched on words. 4th grade: Recorders (no mallet madness) 5th grade: Played the C Pentatonic scale up on numbers 1-5 and down on numbers 6-10. Non-pitched percussion on words. Also, added Crazy 8s, introduced some classes to the idea of Original, Retrograde, Inversion and Retrograde Inversion forms. Students were really excited and receptive to these activities. It was particularly exciting ...

What? Mallet Madness is a book by Artie Almeida, a leader in music education. It is for grades K-6 and this model has every child playing a variety of instruments for the entire music class. The room is set up with 24 instruments total, made up of four rows. Ideally, there is an equal amount of pitched and non-pitched percussion, however, I had about 1/3 pitched percussion and 2/3 non pitched. Students first learn the rotation pattern and signal, and then we start playing. The first step was to set our routines and norms; most importantly that instruments are only to be played when I ask. I took care to reinforce this continually with all of my classes, notably, the age that followed this rule the best was kindergarten. When students entered the room, I invited the to sit down at a table spot so I could introduce the activity there. I gave instructions for our rotation and process, and then asked students if they were curious about any of the instruments. This gave me an opportunity t...

This week was a bit of a strange one for us. We had an early out on Tuesday, but with the snow, most of our students were late to school, so the first hour had very few students, and after that, students were in flux anyway. Between "I Love to Read" and Valentine's Day excitement, the whole schedule was a bit discombobulated and while I did have a President's Day activity that briefly introduced the idea of Orff Instrumentation to some of my older students, for the most part, it wasn't anything notable. I had a sub on Thursday and Friday so I could attend the MN Music Ed Mid Winter Conference, and I took a lot of ideas from that to implement in our programs. I'm working on a proposal to purchase a classroom set of ukuleles and diversify our recorder complement by adding alto, tenor and bass recorder. I also made some great connections with colleagues and worked on some curriculum review for both the band program and the general music program. So this week'...

What: I had an usual teaching week because of snow days and late starts, so my reflection this week has to do with what I did with the color guard team I coach. We've been focusing on fundamentals during our winter clinics, and one of the keys for this is what we call 'staying in the toaster.' This is a term that reminds students to keep their flags in the correct plane and angle as they move them around their bodies. The term comes from the idea of standing inside a toaster and not wanting to touch the hot sides of it. For this particular exercise, we also incorporated some team building trust exercises. Students lined up at a two step interval and had to perform several sets of the technique without bumping the person in front of them with the flag. So What: I recorded the exercise, and had students watch it back on the big screen. This allowed us to watch for inconsistencies- often it is easy to think that you are right on with counts and watching the playback helps ...

What? Because of the snow days this week, I only had one cycle day of classes. I was supposed to be wrapping up our musical theatre unit for all of the grades and then introducing the next unit, including recorders, this week, and the classes that I saw already had their wrap up and intro. If I moved ahead with them, they would be two weeks ahead of the other classes. So I spent some of cold days working on an Escape Room style game that helped review some music skills and introduced our composer for the month of February. I bought 5 blank puzzles from a craft store and drew a different mystery rhythm on each one. I also included an additional musical symbol for the next step. On the back, I put the mystery rhythm on each puzzle piece. I put 4 pieces from each puzzle in a small bag and then all of the other puzzles into a big bag, in order to make sure that students groups would be mostly equal. When students came in, the room was dark with spy music playing. I had created a slideshow...