Music a la Cart: Limited Resource Edition

       Hello everyone! My name is Bethany Bassler and I’m a PK-8^th music teacher in North Carolina. I am in my second year at my school and at the beginning of August I got a call from my administrator saying that my room, which was being transferred to a trailer, would not be ready at the beginning of the school year. Eek!  The result would be music on a cart to start the year, with an undefined open date to a trailer room.

Let the Great Organization Begin!

All items in my classroom had to be organized into three categories: what I wanted on the cart, what I eventually wanted in my classroom, and what was going into long-term storage. My window of cart-teaching was anywhere from 3-5 weeks, but even that was questionable, so my selection of materials had to be varied and cover all grade levels for that time frame of teaching. I didn’t know this at the time, but I also had very limited access to any other materials that were eventually going into the trailer, so switching out materials was near impossible.

The majority of my students are on a modified sequence, so I also had to consider what materials I used most frequently and had the most versatile uses across grade levels.

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Sequencing Start-Up

Hi everyone, this is Laura Beese, and I’m excited to be blogging for the first time here at Kodály Corner! I just started teaching at a new school this year, so sequencing for a new group of students has been consuming my thoughts. Hopefully some of my reflections will be helpful to you whether you’re in your first year of teaching or your fifteenth!

Building Community

Just as Jamie talked about in the previous post, kids will be open to whatever you bring to them if they love you and they love coming to music. I look for activities that are going to get kids moving, playing name games, mixing, and singing together. It’s important to me that kids have a blast in music and leave with big grins on their faces looking forward to the next class. (This is true of every lesson, but FUN is especially a focus of the first few weeks.) Though expectations are an important part of a first day lesson, I only spend five minutes on explicit teaching of the “rules,” and the rest of the lesson is spent actively practicing the expectations through the kinds of games, dances, and songs we’ll be doing the rest of the year. Below are some of the students’ favorite activities from this year’s fist few lessons:

• K/1st: Page’s Train (fast/slow; names)
• 2nd: Jump Josie (circle play party with cumulative partner choosing)
• 2nd, 3rd: Julie Ann Johnson (closing song with guitar where students get to decide where Julie will travel, how she'll get there, and what she'll do. They loooove this one!)
• 3rd, 4th: Sasha mixer (Energetic and easy-to-teach mixer)
• 4th, 5th: Funga Alafia (I used as a chorus for a name game. Students would create 4-beat ostinato patterns for the class to copy during singing, then four individuals at a time would say "My name is _______" and the class would echo. Great synco-pa prep , and ripe with extensions for drumming and instruments! Amy Abbott has nice slides and notation for teaching Funga Alafia in her back to school set!)
• 3rd, 4th: King Kong Kitchie (Closing song with call/response and verse/refrain that 3rd and 4th grade love. Also a great tika-tika prep.)

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