Grant
Undergraduate
Music Education |
Grant
Undergraduate
Music Education |
After teaching 23 individual lessons last week, I can definitely say I am exhausted! In the IB curriculum, each year group has a Unit of Inquiry, where all of their instruction focuses around a specific theme. The Year 2s are working on a unit on water and I had a couple of really fantastic lessons with them last week. One of our classes we focused on sound waves and vibration, including how lower pitches and higher pitches have different wavelengths. I brought in 3 glasses and filled them each with different amounts of water. We sketched the sound waves of each glass, determined what notes each glass sounded (hit the glass with spoons), and put them into an Orff orchestration of the Erie Canal (also water themed!).
Over the past 2 weeks, my mentor teacher and I have planned Friday Recitals where students have played piano, saxophone, and trumpet for faculty and their peers. I worked with the saxophone and trumpet students 1-on-1 in the days leading up to the recital and they played great! We put on the recitals in the music room, where students and faculty can attend during their lunch break. The recitals have been well attended and we are hoping they will be a weekly occurrence! As of right now, the only music in the school is classroom music. In my public speaking classes for Years 7-9, we have been continuing with the United Nations, types of governments, and types of debates. For the United Nations, we have been discussing what topics the UN is involved in and their responsibilities. Students have also been focusing on different types of government, focusing on similarities and differences between England, Italy, and the United States. The students were truly surprised by the Electoral College and asked lots of great questions. Our debate students have been focusing on techniques such as Ad Hominem, Ad Populum, Straw Man, and the False Dilemma. Students in our debate classes have been participating in and creating scripts utilizing each debate tactic. Managing classroom behavior is what I am focusing on the most - keeping students engaged and being good listeners to their peers. I have been trying different ways to keep the middle schoolers more focused and I have had the best luck with assigned groups of 4. When each student walks in the room, they get a number 1-4 and that is their group for the class. I have been keeping track of which groups work really well and wish groups do not. I have truly underestimated the importance of keeping students focused as soon as they enter the class. With the younger students I have been using a small drum for them to march to as they walk to the music room. With the older students, I have been utilizing bell-work - a short task with a timer as soon as they enter the room. I have also been keeping track of how long it takes the students to get set up for the class and created a scoreboard for their best times. I even tried an experiment where I have a prompt on the board and said nothing as the students entered the room. It is interesting that the Year 9s took 14 minutes to all enter the classroom and sit down. I only have half of a week left and I am done! Enjoy this watercolor painting I made over the weekend!
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This past week was a 4 day week due to Italian Liberation Day on Tuesday April 25th - it was nice to have that Tuesday off but that Wednesday truly felt like a Monday.
I taught multiple Year 4 lessons on music technology, transitioning from Chrome Music Lab Sound Maker and introducing them to BandLab. It took almost one whole 45 minute class to have all the students create an account - it’s funny how technology doesn’t go your way some days! The goal of their BandLab assignment, as I have mentioned in my last blog, is to create a composition with sounds from Siena. The Y4 students are continuing to learn about looping and sampling and how we can utilize both in compositions. One way I demonstrated this is by relating ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme Gimme!” to Madonna’s “Hung up.” (For reference, listen to the first 40 seconds of Madonna https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e99M6-7KW0k) With the Year 1 students, we are transitioning from our unit on tempo/measurement to animals and instrument families. I am teaching them about the 4 main instrument families (woodwind, brass, string, percussion) and how each produces their sound. I have been utilizing resources such as the US Army Field Band Instrument Demonstration for Beginning Band and Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Students have been working on naming the instruments, placing them in their respective instrument families, and relating instruments to animals (2 of their examples are relating a flute to a bird and a trombone to an elephant). They are truly a smart class and have been utilizing percussion instruments to see the different ways we can play percussion. My mentor teacher and I are debating to start recorders with them - yes the instrument that everyone plays in elementary school. We will continue to learn more in depth about instrument families this upcoming week and I think one way to demonstrate the woodwind family is to play saxophone for them! Over the weekend, 5 of us traveled to Grosseto and then onto a beach campground, Riva del Sole near Castiglione Della Pescaia . It rained all weekend but that didn’t stop us from enjoying our stay. We stayed in a 3-bedroom cabin, ate at the beach restaurant, and even went swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The weekend was a fun time even though it was hard to stay dry! |
AuthorHello everyone and welcome to my blog about my experience student teaching at the International School of Siena! My name is Grant Asklar and I am a senior Music Education major at SUNY Buffalo State University. I play primarily saxophone, clarinet, and flute, and am looking forward to this intercultural teaching experience. Archives
May 2023
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