I knew that I would change my teaching strategies after the summer course with Steve Calantropio, but I didn’t really realize how much until teachers asked me today if I could support their math curriculum which is pattern identification and recognition at the moment. Easy! We do that in music all the time, we had just been working out a pattern using a piece from the Schulwerk and the kids names, broken it into parts and identified the form with a color pattern. The grade 7 teacher wants to know if I can have the kids write the form as though it were an algebraic equation. So how would that look? Our form was A A’ B B A’, do I use exponents to show the A’? I’ll have to think through that one!
I have certainly seen that taking learning down to the basics and building it from there is the way to go. I had grade 6 students today laughing and working to do a body percussion piece and then commenting “that sounded so cool!” I guess sometimes I do somethings right. Steve said we should use high quality music and the kids would respond, so I chose a piece from the Schulwerk, adapted it for all the different grades, and voile! I only had to learn one piece this week. Brilliant! – Thanks Steve!
