In a music room far, far away...

In a music room far, far away...

With all of the excitement lately, I've been seeing lots of great activities for music lessons related to the one of the best movie series of ALL TIME, so I thought I'd put together a list of freebies, products, and activities that could work to get the kids excited AND teach them musical concepts!#1: "Imperial March" listening lessonI put together this free listening lesson to help students practice...

Apps for Gradekeeping

Apps for Gradekeeping

Over the years I've tried out several different grade-keeping apps. Below I'm describing my favorites; most of the apps can be used even if you only have one iPad in your classroom!NumbersWhen I first bought an iPad mini, this is the app I used for grade keeping. It is like the Apple equivalent of Excel, so you can build your grade book like a spreadsheet. Here is a screenshot sample:In the screenshot...

Five Favorite Pins of December

Five Favorite Pins of December

Hi everyone! Since it's December, here is my five favorite pins linky party!Here are my five favorite pins this month:#1: Stretchy Band activitiesI just bought a stretchy band from Bear Paw Creek, and am SO excited to use it, so was thrilled to find this pin with some great activities! So far, I've only used it to help students remain in a circle for a circle dance (which did totally help!) so I'm...

Tips for directing a sing-along

Tips for directing a sing-along

The singalong is an event I first became familiar with my first year in my district. It's an opportunity for the entire student body, parents, family members, and teachers to all get together and sing. We do this in the thirty minutes before the holiday parties, the last day before break, and I have to say, I have really grown to love it! It's so wonderful to get such a big community of people together...

Indexing folk songs with Evernote

Indexing folk songs with Evernote

I just recently discovered how Evernote can be used as a really powerful tool to index, categorize, and improve productivity, so today I’m blogging about how to use Evernote as a way to categorize and index folk songs!If you’re looking for more information about creating a song index in Excel, here is a video I recorded this summer:Evernote is a free app which you can install on your PC or Mac, as...

Adapting to a new schedule

Adapting to a new schedule

A year and a half ago, my music schedule drastically changed, from music twice a week for 35 minutes to music once every 5 days for 50 minutes (on an ABCDE rotation)...with some slight variations, which I'll talk about in a minute.Needless to say, I was a bit tentative and scared. I was disappointed I'd be seeing the kids less. Almost my entire career, I have taught music to each grade level twice...

Five favorite pins of November

Five favorite pins of November

Hi everyone! Since it's November, so here is my five favorite pins linky party!Here is my list for this month; just click each picture to view that pin. Also check the end of the blog post for a fun Pinterest contest!#1: Dalcroze Eurhythmics ExercisesI just created a new Dalcroze-inspired board, and was excited to pin this to the board! These exercises could easily be used in the general music classroom...

Thanksgiving in the Music Room

Thanksgiving in the Music Room

Since Thanksgiving is just a couple weeks away, today I'm going to blog about my favorite Thanksgiving activities for the music room.Thanksgiving this year happens to fall on my birthday, so I'm feeling especially festive. :) Here goes!Turkey rhythmsI wrote this blog post about using foam turkey feathers and paper plates to build rhythm turkeys. Here is a picture of my students working on it. It was...

What I've learned about interactive notebooks

What I've learned about interactive notebooks

This year, I embarked on the journey of trying out interactive notebooks with my students. (You can read about why I started the notebooks in this blog post.) So far, I've been able to try them out with my third graders, and because this is so different from anything else I've done with my students, I thought I'd share my initial thoughts. Here is what I've learned so far about interactive notebooks:1....