Plugging Away

Still immobilized from my foot sprain, I've been moving soooo slow to get my planning done.  I have all the time in the world and it's taking me forever to get anything done.

I feel really creatively stifled at the moment when it comes to getting activities ready for my students but I keep hoping that something will come to me soon

There is another sale coming to my store to kick off the new year.  Everything will be 20% off starting January 1 - 4 so check out the store for the sale and new items I'll be adding soon

Winter Break!

The day goes by so much quicker when it's a half day and the kids go ice skating!

To celebrate winter break there will be a sale in my TpT store over the weekend and Monday!

Now for some much needed relaxation!

Just Another Day in 6th Grade

They successfully played a piece in 4 parts for the first time on the mallet instruments and then proceeded to do tiny dances behind their instruments...to which I responded:

"You guys are so spastic and weird."

to which one 6th grader replied:

"Why thank you!"

I love the days when they stop being hormonal pre-teens and are themselves again

Get Your Wishlists Ready!

The great thing about a whole week off is the time I have to catch up on my work and make some great resources for my lessons.

In anticipation of my 3rd - 5th graders coming back I've been making more powerpoints to accompany the songs they will be learning along with some pretty cool spur of the moment worksheets I've been coming up with.

With cyber-Monday coming up.  Teachers Pay Teachers is getting ready too join in on the deals as well.  Check my store (and others's as well) and start a wishlist to be ready for amazing deals on Monday.  I will be offering 20% off my store Mon - Wed.

Check back for the TpT banner and sale flyer!

Hooray for Great Teachers who make better worksheets than me!!!

As I was sitting down to write out another tedious workbook for my middle school students a Google image search of some worksheets led me to Susan Paradis.  I now have enough worksheets to put a work packet together for my students without it taking too much time.

There are a lot of resources for teaching piano, so one day maybe if I get a piano lab I know where to find resources. Much of the activities that are for piano I can use to help my students begin writing melodies.

How I missed this earlier on, I do not know...or maybe my brain is just extra creative today!

This Just in from TpT!

Very happy that I discovered this site.  See their status update below for a discount code, "LIKE" them on Facebook, and spread the word!

WOW!!!! We did it together! 100,000 LIKES ON TeachersPayTeachers.com! We are thrilled, proud, and think every one of you is fantastic. To celebrate, please use promo code "FB100K" for 10% off the entire TpT site (including sale items!). This promo code is only announced on FB and will only be active through midnight Hawaii time on 10/14 (that's a day and a half to get everything on wish list). WE LOVE OUR TpT'ers! (Date corrected: We're a little excited over here :))

The Babies Have Arrived!

None related to me, but my K-2 babies.  Some brand new, and some coming into my room for the second and third times.

I wish I could say I knew what to expect from all of them, but with the mix of a lot of students new to our school and some continuing difficult behaviors, after the first day of getting them oriented, I hit the ground running with routines and happily it wasn't complete chaos.  I am waiting for those kids I have been warned about to show their true colors, but I'm fine waiting until June for that.

My hope is to foster more cooperative learning with all of them to see what will result.

Here is the basic seating arrangement for the little ones (sorry for the blur, my camera did not want to focus that day).  Amazingly, they all fit fairly comfortably and it is perfect for the kindergartners.  I have between 25 - 29 students in each class so I'm happy they all fit well.  It has been a challenge to get them moving with the different leveled platforms in my room but I've appreciated the kids' flexibility as I continually figure out how best to use the space I have

The colored mats have been my best idea so far.  Now I know it's only been 2 days but amazingly they have survived the tugs of the kids (here's hoping they can make it through 5 more weeks).  They were smaller than I anticipated but for the price they will do and it doesn't bust my budget to get more if I need them (thank you Amazon!)

As I work out the tiny issues I still have in the room I will get some more photos up

Time Signature

The bane of my existence (next to syncopation) is when I have to teach time signature to my students.

I was a product of music educators that told me that when I saw a symbol that it meant "______________" and I assumed they were correct and did not question them further

Teaching ELL students and students who are in general more analytical, this simple task of just hoping that they will think about time signature as simply as I did is wishful thinking. They use their funds of knowledge more than they even know and end up over-thinking this all the time.

When I had to stop and think about what a time signature was all about, my right brain decided that I couldn't just break it down as precisely as it was and leave it at that.  Since I am making a more conscious effort to promote more right brain thinking in my students, I gave them a visual to help offset their tendencies to over-think.

You can purchase this PowerPoint at my TpT Store.  Later on I will add another PowerPoint that helps with the bottom number of the time signature which is much more complicated for my students to figure out.

In third grade the state standard pertaining to time signature states that students should be able to "Explain the function of the top number of a time signature involving two, three, and four beats." and then the bottom number is added for fourth grade

I animate my powerpoints so some of the images look a little weird or make absolutely no sense.

Since I have just finished teaching my students steady beat, and they will start to read written music, start by having them realize that the beats need to be organized (I've always pictured beats and bouncy balls that will go wherever they want)

I call a measure a box, and the box only fits so much inside of it.  But we do not know how many beats can fit unless we have a helper:  time signature.

I love my animation on this slide, each dot will move itself into the measure!  The reason I use a quarter note instead of the common 4 in the bottom position is because it does not look like a fraction so my students do not think of a time signature as a fraction (which a lot of times ends up happening).  I have also seen this time signature format used in some recorder and elementary method books and when it comes time to change over to having a number in the bottom I can simply tell students that it means the same as the time signature they were seeing before

I then walk my students through how to figure out the time signature of a rhythm (the time signature appears at the end).  

• First I have the students say and clap the rhythm
• Second, I have them say the rhythm and tap the steady beat on their laps (this took about 5 tries for all of my students to get the hang of this)
• I then ask how many times they tapped their laps when they read their rhythm (they show me the number on their fingers)
• Then my students tell me the number of beats in the measure and I confirm if they answer correctly.

The amount of "ah-ha" moments that they all had all at once was awesome !

There are several slides following that allow the students to practice figuring out the time signature and then as an extension (especially for my 4th graders), I give them correct and incorrect measures and using the step-by-step process we used earlier, they can tell me if the measure is correct or incorrect.  If it is incorrect, I ask them to offer a solution as to how the measure can be corrected to match the time signature.

TpT Works!

I was apprehensive about joining Teachers Pay Teachers, but I am completely sold on this site which is by far one of the best ideas I've ever encountered for teachers.  The resources I purchase or download for free have been helpful in helping me generate ideas or executing a lesson.

I've marveled at the potential of earning extra money as well.  It has been slow but the fact that I have some decent stuff people are willing to purchase is a huge boost in my confidence that what I make for my students is helpful for someone else!

If you haven't joined you really should!

The Accomplishment of No Effort

I'm not sure what my students are trying to prove to me when they turn in work with:

-no name...I suppose they still think I'm kidding when I say I'll throw it out?

-work where they clearly did not read the directions

-incomplete work after I had informed them that every paper they turned in might count for their grade

I get it, end of the year, we go to school longer than the districts, I don't really care mentalities reflected in their work, and so on.  But for some reason they forget that I will teach them again next year...

What disappoints me more than anything is that they can do this work; NOTHING is new! My current 6th graders learned all of this in 5th grade.  The students that were new this year are doing better than the ones who were my students the year before. If they know what they are doing, they definitely do not show it, if they don't  they are so easily defeated and completely fine with it.  They are just waiting for me to show them how to do it correctly,  but I can't anymore.

Learn by doing doesn't work when only a handful want to try.  Knowing full well that they can if they put forth the effort, I will continue on.  For some of them it is going to be a frustrating struggle, but I am now picking my battles and with those few who hold the whole group back it will just be themselves holding them back.

I hate to say that I'm just letting the time go by until the three current middle school grades are gone and then I'll have the type of program I want is unfortunately the first thing I think, but what else am I supposed to think?   

I know the type of teacher I can become if I work at it this summer, but I find myself at an impasse with middle school and channeling my track coach, thinking to myself: "I can't make chicken salad with chicken crap".

I Need a Bigger Board

Here is the new set-up for my classroom after a failed attempt at bucket seats for my elementary students who did a really good job destroying them. I realized that the blue step ups to the stage were Wenger Flip-Ups (?) and I could move them!

With my middle schoolers coming back tomorrow I am waiting to see which one falls off the top step first.

The most frustrating part of my classroom is the lack of an interactive whiteboard.  I never had a need for one of them until I saw a clinician at CMEA using PowerPoints as visual aids when teaching; that was when I decided to finally digitize my lessons.   The only downside is that my white board is against a wall which would mean my students would need to sit lengthwise on the platforms and it would not have worked well for the kids seeing anything.

The room has gone through many transitions this year, trying to find the best way to make sure the kids can see the projection. Behind the curtain is a huge screen that would be perfect, but the lunch tables live on the stage so no more big screen :( The flimsy white board on wheels will have to do for now.

Black Faces

Standing in the shadow of the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington D.C., I am in awe of it's enormity and magnificence, but troubled by the response of my students.  Yesterday was a long tiresome day with the kids way off their game in terms of their learning and showing what they  know; I have seen my kids in a new light and I'm impressed by some and discouraged by many; we hold them up so high and it's always so hard to see some fall from that lofty platform.

I had a quick conversation with my principal who was traveling with us:  the problem our kids are having:  context.  None of this history matters to them or has any relevancy away from having to know it for TCAP, or to the other reality of taking the U.S. Citizenship test.

I teach mostly Latino students.  I agree that regardless of the race of my students MLK is an important figure in this country when it comes to social justice, but my students do not see their own heritage represented in the nation's capital.  Wandering through the Native American Museum, I longed for the kids to be able to discover their native heritage, to find some pride; a stronger sense of identity.  Not of Mexico, but feeling lost or unwanted in the United States, my students are in a limbo I can relate to but never imagined could exist.  As a multi-racial person I would be grouped into the race that I resembled the most.  Growing up where I did, I found my identity without a race or nationality attached, which remains the most liberating moment of my life when I realized that bi-racial was a race and, neither of the two could truly support in defining who I am.

But my students are seemingly unwanted by the rest of this country.  In D.C. I hardly heard Spanish.  There were many other languages, but rarely Spanish, and I wondered how they felt.  On the trains they spoke in Spanish quietly or sometimes more English than they would normally use conversing with each other.  Maybe to not draw attention to themselves?  I think constantly about the isolated lives my students live:  some rarely venture away from their street let alone across the country, and when they do, they find in the heart of our country, no trace of recognition for their own cultural heritage.

Which brings me back to context:  they are in-between, in-between countries, and some feel no connection or identity to either country.  How do I as a teacher, teach them to find an identity in a place where they do not wholly feel accepted?

A Seemingly Good Idea...For a Crazy Person

I embarked on a project of proportions I did not anticipate for my elementary students. There could have been ample time to compile all the necessary materials to have made this successful, but with assessment and unit deadlines, plus my own lesson planning, time wad not open my side

I wanted each of my elementary students to have their own composition folders like I had seen on other music teaching websites. I still think it is a great idea, but I also need to remember that the blogs I follow are comprised mainly of teachers in the 'burbs who have maybe no more than 23 kids in their classes...but I teach in the 'hood where there are upwards of 30 tiny people in my class at once, and just me alone to manage theme

To then attempt to get things ready in two week with virtually no planning time, 275 kid to teach everyday, still planning a wedding, and get ready for a 5-day trip with my kids to D.C.....great idea, wrong time :(

Why I Teach

For the rest of my life I will remember the face of one of my girls this afternoon:

This little girl (literally little) in 5th grade is one of 52 amazing students I met as 4th graders.  They are with no exaggeration  nothing short of amazing!  So happy to learn, so eager to learn, and so incredibly talented. As they hit that love time called adolescence, their are some more imperfections coming to the surface, but their intelligence is not dwindling.

Reading music comes naturally to many of them and when they took their benchmark last week I was expecting them to do incredibly well on it.  Minus some students who did not show up for their performance, and some who are still lost in the notation, all of them scored "Proficient" or "Advanced" and I was so happy with the results:  confirmations that Orff can work for these kids when they are willing to let go of themselves and have fun.

We all, including their classmates, have expectations of some of the more advanced students:  that they will always get everything right.  Well today that did not happen.  A lot of them missed one or two questions that I anticipated them getting wrong, but I did not anticipate this little girl to blow even the advanced students out of the water.  With her ELL struggles and general quiet nature, she was learning her music at a slower pace and was always nervous to answer questions or seek me out for help.  As I tallied scores, she did not miss a single question.  The only student in her class of 52 to do this.

I sang praises of so many of them to their teachers and I waited at lunch to tell my little girl the news.  When I  told her she didn't miss any questions, there were no words coming from her mouth, only the largest smile that I've ever seen from her that radiated from her eyes and her entire face.  Her breathing picked up and her smile grew.  I actually made a student speechless in a good way!  I was almost in tears of happiness and had to hug her to keep myself from crying and also worried that she might hyperventilate.

Just thinking about that moment day after day gives me chills, and those are the moments that keep me teaching.

Snow Day in April

My school district never has snow days, we easily could but the big reason is because it would leave many kids in the district without a meal. But this storm is looking to be a big one although at the moment it hasn't done a whole lot.

I will happily take the snow day, since it will be my 4th official snow day in the 6 years I have been teaching. Most likely I will be getting my grading and planning done, but my nerves move to my amazing 5th graders who have a performance on Wednesday and have lost a day of practice. I know they will be ok, but that still does not help the nerves :/

Kid Quote #1

If only they realized how funny and clever they are!

The set up to this one, is that I have a 7th grader who no matter where I seat him finds a way to drum away on anything around him. I finally reached my last bit of tolerance and this was the exchange.

Me: ok, no more chances, if you don't show me you can control yourself you don't get to play the drums
Student M: what! That's not fair!
Me: oh, it's completely fair

I continued teaching for another 10 minutes when he began drumming again

Me: yep, no drum for M
Student M: that's mean Ms.
Me: it's not mean, I'm just following the rules
Student A: wait, there's a rule?
Me: I'm breaking a rule by telling you this but, basically you NEVER give the kids who can't be quiet or still the instruments that make loud sounds; you give them the smallest quietest instrument you have
Student A: for real?
Me: for real
Student A: so that's why I always had to play the tiny triangle in 4th grade! It all makes so much sense now!

State Testing and 3 Days to Spring Break

I lose time with my students this week and also last week due to TCAP.  I'm thankful for the extra time I have this week to get my room cleaned and get going on planning.

But I am also a mere 7 minutes away from my 7th and 8th graders coming to me for an hour...at the end of the day...after 4 hours of testing....

So I am content to sit and glue elastic to multi-colored pom-poms with eyes until they arrive at my door

Handing Out Tough Love

Given the space of time between beginning this and now should be a testament to how much I have going on.  From returning from an inspirational conference, restructuring my elementary classroom in the midst of a unit, changing over to my middle school students, and literally pushing them through my classes amidst state testing ...yeah, it's been a bit chaotic.

Oh yeah, and away from work I'm getting married in 4 months.  So I take that back, it's gone beyond chaotic.

Sundays are my day to get all my plans ready for the next week.  Luckily I finally have some direction for my middle school students that I'm at the point where I look at the objective and know what they need to do for the day.  But given it's middle school, and they have been dragging their feet, we'll see how productive they will be.

It's hard to let them fail (which about 80% of them will given their work effort), but they need to experience it.  Working in an urban setting however, I find my students more than ready to admit defeat.  I've known since I began teaching that urban students put a lot of pressure on themselves to be perfect good at it, so I'm not going to try to be better" mentality is so frustrating to me and I don't know how to get them going.  Giving them repertoire that is too easy might help, but then the minute I raise the bar and they make a mistake they shut down.  I offer time to work one-on-one, some take it, some do not, but whatever the choice they make, that defeatist mentality comes back.

There is also the kids' notion that appearing intelligent is not a good thing, or that their classmates will give them a hard time.  Happily some of them are realizing that their intelligence gained them admission into private high schools and it is trickling down to the rest of the middle schoolers.  But for a larger number of them, I'm having to revert back to the "oh, well" mindset.

Over my six years of teaching I've found a balance between work and life.  I have deadlines to make for my last set of units, and it's going to take a long time.  So I'm choosing for my own sanity to not revise their benchmarks to ensure that a majority of them will pass.  Too many of them just sit there and don't try.  I'm going back into "drill sargenat" mode; and some of them will get a big dose of reality when they get their progress reports.

It's hard to do when you see so much talent in your students and you have the opportunity for them to explore all aspects of music and some of them could care less.  It's not just in my class but in all other contents.  Tough love...that's all I can give.  I won't lower my expectations just because they want to be lazy.  Hard to do when you care so much, but it's the right thing to do.

The Very Beginning

This may turn into another blog that I end up neglecting simply because I have so much going on.  But I want to make a better effort this time, because I feel like someone needs to be saying something.  If there are others writing about similar situations, I am happy to join those voices.

Beginning this all cam about because of where I am right at this moment.  Sitting at a desk in possibly the most expensive and elite hotel in the state of Colorado where every year a three-day clinic and conference takes place for music educators in the state.

Wonderful people, wonderful workshops, but horribly biased.

Much has changed for me in my view of music education.  As I went through my courses last year for my endorsement in LDE (linguistically diverse education), I discovered that my music curriculum didn't have much give in terms of differentiation and modifications for ELLs (English Language Learners).  I was feeling stifled by the resources I had and coming up short on ideas for how to keep my students engaged while still teaching them what they needed to know and improving their skills.

After not attending this conference for 4 years I was excited to see what new ideas and methods were out there.  Now more of a general music teacher, going to the Orff workshops were incredible and gave me more ways to support my students than I ever imagined.  But I also have middle school students who have the potential to be spectacular singers, so I decided to go to as many singing readings as I could.

The result aside from a tired voice was 37 vocal scores from an elementary level to high school.  Some I loved, some I wasn't thrilled with, some were too hard for my kids at the moment, and some were perfect.  But I was left questioning the choice in picking these particular pieces.  Yes they are very diverse, but culturally biased.  Nursery rhymes, Lewis Carroll, 50s pop...subjects my students have trouble understanding because of their culture.  Everything super melodic, moderately fast, nothing I knew that if I played for my kids they would like.

If I were in the 'burbs all of these would be "very nice" but in the 'hood of north Denver, the beat needs to be big, the accompaniment interesting, and most of all, they need to connect with the music.  Wrapping my head around how to make some of these really exciting songs fun is going to take a while.  We have not found our voice as a school in what we want in the arts.