Here’s a series of fall arts activities that include movement, music, art and poetry. These activities are perfect for arts integration into curriculum, offering children a chance to reflect on fall colors and the change of seasons, as well as botany and earth science related to seasonal change. These lessons…
I recently watched a video about arts integration at the Two Rivers Charter School in Washington, D.C. Second graders created giant Jackson Pollock-style paintings while learning about the physics of flight; fourth graders learned about their local rivers by enacting the history of a river through poetry, movement and drama….
It’s great fun to engage children in stories with music and acting. Elsewhere on this blog, you can find posts about my musical versions of stories such as “The Three Little Pigs” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Click on “Story Songs” to find several examples. These musical dramas don’t…
I love making music with kids aged 3-6, especially pairing music with early literacy learning, which is a natural fit. I once taught at a preschool where the director told me: “Just have fun singing with the kids,” implying that they’d pick up the literacy learning elsewhere in their day….
The story of the Three Bears is a fun way to help children learn about high, medium and low pitches. This idea is not original to me (I’ve referenced some lesson plans below), but I found a way to involve students playing different instruments and repeating lines of the story….
Seek the joy! It’s one of the guiding principles of the elementary school I helped to found in the summer of 2015. It’s the core principle of my music classroom. Recently, at a pre-holiday gathering, our school staff all wrote shout-outs to each other. I saw “joy” repeatedly in the…
I’ve been teaching my students in kindergarten and first grade about musical opposites. Right now, we’re especially focused on how pitches can move up and down, high and low. I learned the following finger play from a friend; the author is unknown. I adapted the words to teach more clearly…
Music education is good because it helps raise students’ test scores. I recently read an article by teacher and blogger Peter Greene that adamantly contends we should not use this argument to justify music education. Hmmm. Why not? If test scores go up when music is part of the school…
Ever dream of flying? Not flying on an airplane, though I love that, too. I mean letting your body catch the wind as you rise up into the air, soaring and gliding and seeing the sights far below. The classic Peter Pan fired children’s imaginations about flying. Just a little…
During the summer of 2016, I had lots of adventures. While traveling through the American south, I stopped at the University of Memphis for two weeks to take a course about an approach to music education called Orff. Orff isn’t an acronym, it’s the name of the founder, Carl Orff,…
