Mar 10 2009
Music to my ears
Elementary teachers do it all. We teach math, science, social studies, music, phys ed…. you name it, we teach it. Music is one subject that many of my colleagues feel a little uncomfortable teaching. I am extremely fortunate to work with Nathan whose background is in music. He has created a webpage that we use to teach our classes to play the recorder. I know that Nathan wants to fix the page up but it is working now and our students really benefit from it.
We follow a Recorder Karate program. In addition to teaching the class in the fundamentals of playing the recorder, the students work at their own rate to earn “karate belts”. The belts are pieces of embroidery floss tied onto the ends of the recorders. The students really like to collect as many belts as they can. Nathan has set up the site with the requirements for each belt. The students need to identify notes by name, clap a rhythm and play a song. There is sheet music available on the site for each song and a play along, karaoke mp3. When the student is ready, they come to one of us to do their belt test.
One plan that Nathan has for the site is to replace the canned recorder music with recordings of our students playing the songs. What a great way to motivate the kids and to put those digital voice recorders to work. The students can master a piece or two of music and become the “play along” for everyone else.
This wasn’t Nathan’s original idea, but he has done a fair bit of work on it. Portable PD is a place to share ideas about using podcasting and audio recording. This is one idea that I have found invaluable and I know that others will too.
Click here to get to Nathan’s page. Keep checking the site and listening to Portable Radio. We will be posting our students’ playing in the near future.
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