12 Drummers Drumming

Today, I had the opportunity to visit and teach at a different elementary school in my district. Since my cooperating teacher is only part time (.8), he currently does not teach on Tuesdays. Until my middle school placement gets figured out, I will be observing and teaching at other schools around the district.

In the morning, we had 2 kindergarten classes and one 3rd grade class while in the afternoon we had one 3rd grade, one 1st grade and one kindergarten. I taught my clarinet lesson to all of the classes. It was awesome to be able to improve upon yesterday. Last night, I wrote up a simple lesson plan based upon what worked and what did not, and even thought it was super simple, it was incredibly beneficial to have a plan to work from for every class. I began with talking about what the clarinet is made from, and how they keys and tone holes work (very basically). I then talked about the reed, and had the students feel their throats as they sang. This helped the students understand how the vibrations of the reed worked to make sound. I then played a little bit, and brought out the bass clarinet. I had the students compare and contrast the Bb clarinet and bass clarinet. The students predicted whether it would sound lower or higher and I played the same piece on bass. The 3rd grade students asked intelligent questions while the kindergarten students simply wanted me to play more.

After I taught, the students returned to their normal lessons. The kindergartners played a call and response game. This was a great way to individually assess students without hearing them individually. The entire class would face the back wall and 3-4 students would sit behind the class. Then the class would sing the "call," and 2-3 students would sing the "response." Then the class would identify the students that sang. This is a great way to both get students to listen closely as well as a great way to assess students singing skills.

The 3rd grade classes had a drumming circle today. They were a little rowdy, but they really seemed to enjoy drumming. There were 2 rules, and they were put to rhythms (Ex: Watch out, watch out, watch out for your neigh-bor). One really awesome thing the teacher and students did was foot conducting. The teacher stood in the middle of the circle and the students played in tempo when she walked. Then several students had the opportunity to "food conduct." They generally had trouble keeping a steady tempo, but since they were just beginning drumming, I was told that they would be working on tempo next week. She really just wanted to get the kids playing.

Overall, I had a lot of fun today. I was really able to tweak my lesson plan so that is more appropriate, and I was able to streamline it so that students don't disengage. I am hoping that the more I teach, the less I will need time to tweak lesson plans.