I would like to know whether this would truly interest students
as well as glean more ideas on how to use music effectively in the curriculum.
I wonder if I will be able to effectively pull off a lesson like this and
actually have it
be cohesive and apply to other academic subjects.
Criteria:
1. Is what I'm doing fun? Would it be fun for fourth graders?
2. Does it effectively use music and language together in a lesson?
3. Do you think meaningful learning can take place as a result of this
lesson?
4. Will it lead to meaningful connections in the childrens' minds
--will it help them to broaden their perspectives of learning?
Revision:
Materials:
-easel with chart paper to write down what each riff means
(for the first few riffs, then the activity will become a memory game)
-marker
Thoughts:
I'm not sure my lesson connected to other parts of the curriculum as it
could have. Here are some ways I have
thought of to change the lesson in order to be a more connected and
integrated piece of the curriculum. Once we stop writing down our
new additions to the "language," students start to create
dictionaries of musical terms, adding to the list as we create more language.
We can talk about how dictionaries are organized
and how to define terms in a dictionary.
We can work on the writing process;
drafting, editing, updating, adding, cutting, etc.
in creating the ongoing dictionary.
Another way we could do it is to create a shortcut
code of sorts in order to remind ourselves of the
musical cues. By doing this, students learn by trying different ways how
to keep notes in a quick and efficient manner.
We could use the ongoing music activity as a way of teaching tallying
and graphing in math; students could learn
how to
keep a tally and transfer data into graph form and we could see which
musical hints were most used and which were least used.
We could then extend our graphing knowledge into science and see
how graphs we've
made are similar and different from one another.
I feel confident that the Microteach lesson itself would be interesting for
students and engaging. I think that the
modifications in future plans for this lesson that I
have made will tie together other subjects more
thoroughly and will make the aforementioned lesson more meaningful.
Back to the
music and education page.