Lately, I've noticed an increase in web searches related to curriculum writing and common core. I'm supposing this is because many school districts engage in curriculum writing or revision during the summer, and educators preparing to do this kind of work are looking for resources to draw upon. Music educators are increasingly aware of common … Continue reading Common Core Words in Music
music composition
The Power of the Exit Ticket
Exit tickets are a helpful and efficient tool for assessing student learning. While you (should) have communicated your objective and expectations for students at the beginning of the lesson, and while students may have completed all work that you assigned for them to do during the lesson, none of this gives is a reliable indicator … Continue reading The Power of the Exit Ticket
Strengths and Weaknesses of Orff Schulwerk
Today I will discuss the advantage and disadvantages of the Orff Schulwerk Approach to music education. At the outset, I should mention that no single method of teaching music is sufficient for meeting the needs of all children, or for teaching all aspects of music. Each method bring valuable perspectives into the music classroom, and … Continue reading Strengths and Weaknesses of Orff Schulwerk
What are Antecedent & Consequent Phrases in Music?
Good music, and great music too, has a certain quality that Leonard Bernstein described as inevitability. He was describing that quality of music that leaves the listener with the sense that what he or she just heard was the only possible group of notes that the composer could have written; that any other melodic turn … Continue reading What are Antecedent & Consequent Phrases in Music?
How Do Creativity and Structure Go Together?
Developing creative and expressive thinking is, I believe, at the heart and soul of music education. These two things, creative thinking and expression, are included in the core arts standards, in most arts curricula, and in most defenses of supporting the arts in education. Yet being creative is often misunderstood, and misleading and even harmful … Continue reading How Do Creativity and Structure Go Together?
Where Do I Begin?
For most music teachers, organizing instruction into units makes a lot of sense. Typically, we see see students once or twice a week, or every day for a few weeks out of the school year. Teaching a series of lessons all grounded in a single topic helps reinforce important points from week to week, and … Continue reading Where Do I Begin?
Music Literacy is More Than Reading and Writing Music
Literacy is a word that is easily associated with reading and writing. It is a form of the words literature and literary. But not all literature is written down. Many cultures preserve their literature through oral traditions. In these cultures, a literate person is one who knows the literature from memory and can recall it, … Continue reading Music Literacy is More Than Reading and Writing Music
Invisible Tonality
When we think of something being invisible, surely things that cannot be seen come to mind. The air we breathe, for example, is invisible because we cannot see it (though we can see the effects of it moving an object on which it blows). We know air is all around us because we breathe it … Continue reading Invisible Tonality
Repeat, Vary, and Extend: Three Skills for Creating Artistic Work, Part 2
Note: This post is a continuation of another post from October 19, 2015. In part 1, I laid out a lesson for teaching students to extend rhythmic ideas, starting with language and then translating the sentence examples to rhythms. If you missed that post, you can click on the link above and get caught up. … Continue reading Repeat, Vary, and Extend: Three Skills for Creating Artistic Work, Part 2
More on Poetry and Music
In my last post, I discussed some ways in which poetry and music are alike. In the course of my discussion, I referenced Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures. Today I merely wish to follow up on that reference, by providing you with a video of one of those lectures. It is in all nearly 3 hours … Continue reading More on Poetry and Music
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