Teacher Appreciation Week and Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Today marks the beginning of May.  For some, that means that Spring is in full swing, the birds and bees are out doing their thing, the weather is nice, plants are starting to peek their leaves out, and the pollen is in full force.  For me, it means that I am coming ever closer to the end of the school year and all of the work that brings with it.  I have grades to enter, assessments to give, paperwork to file, certificates to create, 5th grade promotion to run, one more concert to put on, etc. etc. etc.  The end of the school year always becomes a mad dash to the finish to try and squeeze everything in.

One of the best parts, though, is that the beginning of May also brings Teacher Appreciation Week.  This is a fantastic time around my school, as the PTA comes up with a lot of very thoughtful ways to show how much they appreciate the teachers in our building.  Usually we have lunch provided (and sometimes breakfast) most of the week, a few odds and ends that show up in our mailboxes, and the occasional note from a student or several.  These are all fantastic ways to re-energize to the end of the school year.

It's always good to feel appreciated.  Especially at the end of state-mandated testing (which may prove to be the death of me).

On top of the Teacher Appreciation activities at individual schools around the country, TeachersPayTeachers is offering a site-wide sale!  This is always a good thing.  On top of their discount, I will be offering every item in my store at a 20% discount.  That means you can get anything in my store for a combined total of 28% off!

What could be better than that?

Well, in celebration of a milestone for me (I just checked, and I have 40 products available!), I am going to offer an extra day of sale immediately following the TpT sale.  The official site-wide sale will run May 5-6.  My sale will by May 7, and will be a 20% off sale on the entire store.

I highly recommend if you've been looking for Boomwhacker activities that you check out my Boomwhacker Bundle, this will be a fantastic chance to get it at a great price.  Also, if you purchase it now and I update it to include more in the future, you'll get all of the new material for FREE!

I don't know about you, but I like free.

Ok, that's enough of the sales pitch.  I hope you have a fantastic conclusion to your school year, and I'll be back with actual educational writing soon!

It's the little things...

I just spent about 15 minutes making a set of diagrams that I hope will solve one of my most annoying general music problems.  All they are is a layout of the bars for my Orff instruments. One has blank bars, one has all the bars labeled for C major, one is labeled for G major, one is labeled for F major, and the last is set up for C major pentatonic.

I don't know about you, but time lost explaining which bars go where is one of the most annoying aspects of my job.  Never mind that we talk about the musical alphabet.  Never mind that the bars are obviously sized to go in order largest to smallest.  Never mind that the layout of the bars is logical and visually obvious.

Asking students to use their powers of observation and problem-solve is sometimes just too much.

And I sigh heavily.

I don't know why it has taken me so long to think of providing a clear visual of each particular Orff bar set up that we use.



Thankfully, they are in my TeacherspayTeachers store now and ready to use.

 

Tada!

My first thought is the obvious - post this on the Interactive Whiteboard when having students change the bar configuration.  No surprise there.  My second thought is to use them to discuss scales and key signatures.  Also no surprise.  Third, these might come in handy for a class that is too big to have everyone on an instrument.  The third grade at my school is definitely the largest, and to get them all on an instrument would be a challenge (except we're almost exclusively doing recorders now). Having kids use their fingers to find the bars on a printout of the instrument is almost as good as playing if it comes to that.

Another thought is to have students fill in the blank bars as an assessment.  Can they remember what every bar is?  Can they label just the bars that are needed in a one-octave C Major scale?  Can they remember what bars to remove to do a C Major Pentatonic scale?  Can they remember what bar changes to make a G or F Major Scale, and what note/bar becomes do?  There are quite a few assessment possibilities here.  I plan on using many of them, particularly with my fourth and fifth grade students.

The most amazing thing about these diagrams?  They're such a little thing - such an insignificant effort - but I think they will make a big difference in my classroom.  At least I hope they will help alleviate one of the most annoying things that happens in my room.

Hopefully you'll find these useful!  Good luck, and we're in the home stretch of the school year!

TeachersPayTeachers Sale Extended!

Good snowy morning!

Ok, I'll admit it, I am NOT thrilled about the snow that is currently falling outside.  Partly because I need clear part of my roof to avoid making the leak worse that I discovered during the last snow melt.  But mostly because we were just getting back to having everyone back into the routines of school.  Things were finally getting back to normal, projects were underway, learning was happening.... And now... more snow.

Sigh.

But there is a bright side to today.  TeachersPayTeachers has extended their Teachers Are Heroes sale another day.  They are offering up to 28% off sitewide for an extra day!

Thankfully, teachers are the kind of hero that doesn't wear tights.  Well, mostly.

For me, that means that you can snag absolutely everything in my store for 28% off using the discount code HEROES at checkout.  Want to save almost $3 on music education resources?  Try the Great Big Boomwhacker and Orff Collection!  Looking for some beginning band arrangments?  How about Chameleon or Kookaburra?  You could also go straight to my storefront and browse the items that are on sale for less than a dollar! 

So hopefully this TpT sale will help keep you warm on a snowy Winter's day.  And fingers are crossed that the snow stops soon and melts this afternoon and we're back on track tomorrow. (A teacher can hope, right?)

Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Greetings!  I just wanted to make sure anyone and everyone knows about the upcoming TeachersPayTeachers sale - Teachers are Heroes!

On Wednesday, February 25th, everything sitewide is going to be 10% off using promo code HEROES, and many stores will be an additional discount up to 20%.  My store is going to be 20% every item, so by combining the two discounts you can save 28% on anything I have listed.  This is a great opportunity if you're looking at possibly purchasing any of my Boomwhacker resources or beginning band or orchestra arrangements.  Those are the most expensive items in my store, so this is a great chance to scoop them up at a discount.  Here are direct links to each item:

Boomwhackers Introduction Powerpoint

Mary Had a Little Lamb Boomwhacker

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1 with Heart Beats

Boomwhacker Song Collection #1 with Notation

Boomwhacker Song Collection #2 (Pentatonic Songs)

Great Big Boomwhacker Collection

Orff Instrument Bar Labels with Boomwhacker Colors

Big Rock Candy Mountain for Violin

Chameleon for Elementary Band

Kookaburra for Elementary Band


Alternately, you can click the link below to go directly to my storefront:

Have a great week, everyone!

Composition! Or, The Colors, Man, The Colors!

Greetings, internet!

I really am trying to be better about regularly posting, but it is a struggle.  It's funny how working three jobs gets in the way of writing blog posts.  And by funny I mean causes ridiculous amounts of angst.  I was reminded recently of just how much I'm not at home when I looked around the house and counted the number of projects that still need finishing.  I spent most of my Sunday afternoon cleaning up our rabbit cage because it had gotten nasty, a direct result of me not being home enough to keep up with it.

But I digress.

I assume you're here for a post about music education, right?  After all, this is The Mobile Music Mansion, not Mr. Earley's Dysfunctional Rabbit Farm.

AWEEEEEEOWEEOOWEOMUMBAWAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY......

So here we go.

I have gotten back into using a resource that I had created last year - the Boomwhackers Song Collections.  There are currently two available on my Teachers Pay Teachers store

(Collection 1 and Collection 2), and I am working on some new ones.  If you haven't clicked over to see what those activities are about, I'll give you a brief rundown.  Essentially I started using squares and rectangles that were color coded to match the Boomwhacker colors as a means of introducing notation to my youngest students.  I am not a fan of using the little pictograph representations of notes, since I've never seen music notated with smiling bees or anthropomorphic suns and hearts and stars.  Instead, I wanted to use something that would make a logical sequence of reading left to right, grouping by beat, and applying what is read to the instruments at hand.  This works great with Boomwhackers, and even better when scaffolded into Orff instruments.  All of my barred instruments have color coded labels to match the Boomwhackers as well, and students can make a logical transition to playing those instruments after a little time spent practicing on the Boomwhackers.  This can then lead to using traditional notation with colored note heads, and then purely traditional notation.  I am still in the development stages of this plan, so there is a long way to go with implementing this and seeing/measuring the results, but I have high hopes.

Some day I hope to have matching mallets for each instrument

I'm starting to think that maybe I need to spend some more time with Kindergarten and first grade earlier on in the school year to develop the sense of steady beat and tracking the beat while listening.  This is something that my students frequently struggle with, and is at least partly (stereotype warning!) a result of having middle-class Caucasian students forming the bulk of the student body.  These are kids who don't grow up experiencing music as something that they do, but instead as something that exists beyond them, perhaps on a shelf only to be taken out on days they have music class.  I want to move my students to a place where music is part of their everyday life and expression, something that they do without thinking, without hesitating, and without fear of whether it is "good enough."  (I think of this as the "American Idol Phenomenon" - what if we grew up thinking that we weren't good enough because some celebrity judge said we weren't any good?  What  complex to create in young people. But that is another rant for another time,)

Simon says that was the worst improvised ostinato he's ever heard paired with Mary Had a Little Lamb.  You should just stop.

The more students are experiencing music in a hands-on, applied, real sense, the more it becomes a part of who they are.  My goal is to foster that as much as I can in as many students as I can.  It kills me to hear students talk about music like it's some mystery.  Music is all around us, music is a part of what makes us human.

If I can use a bunch of colored rectangles and squares to help reinforce that integral musical part of all of us, I am 100% in.

So then what's next?

Well, in my view that would be composition.  But gone are the days when I would just hand out staff paper to my oldest students and have them write meaningless combinations of notes.  I have been working with students creating ostinatos, which has been nice, but let's go several steps further.  What if students were creating something that had meaning to them, as well as its own musical meaning?  By all means, let's do it!

So I give you color coded composition.  Also, alliteration.  :)

What I am trying now is to have students use construction paper cut to the same relative sizes as the squares and rectangles in the Boomwhacker Song Collections.  I spent a little time working out the measurements I could use, then cut them out of red, orange, yellow, dark green, and purple paper, thus making a C pentatonic scale.  At first I am planning to introduce the concept by giving students a few pieces to work with and having them see what they can come up with.  No rules - anarchy in the music room!  We will arrange the pieces and then perform them for the class, discussing what we hear.  Then, I plan to given a worksheet/template to each student giving some guidelines - mostly beat groupings (hello, time signatures!), but also reinforcing Do as the tonic note.

With my youngest students, it will just be practice to get used to the idea of organizing notes by how they sound, reinforcing Do, and getting to use the Boomwhackers and Orff instruments to create music.

For my second graders, I hope to have them really apply their knowledge of staff notation and transfer what they have done by color onto the treble staff, thus creating true compositions that they can give to anyone and have it played.

Long term, I hope to never again have a student look at a piece of music then look at me and say "I can't read this."

Fingers are crossed.

I'll keep you posted!

Boomwhackers!

You may know (or you may not) that I love Boomwhackers. Better yet, students of all ages love Boomwhackers.  If you have not yet had the joy of seeing or playing them, I will describe briefly.  Each Boomwhacker is a colored plastic tube cut to a specific length.  This allows them to be pitched, and each tube is marked with the pitch it plays, as well as the solfege syllable associated with it (assuming you are using fixed do).  They come in various sets, though the most common set is the standard one-octave diatonic set in C Major.

There are tons of Boomwhacker resources available, some free, some surprisingly expensive.  The neat thing about them though is that you do not need any extra materials.  The tubes can be used with many resources you already have.  Sometimes the best thing to do is to provide no resources and just let the kids explore!

Granted, there is always a need to establish procedures and expectations (Boomwhackers must be held like.... Boomwhackers may not touch your neighbor/other items in the room/small animals... Do not treat them like you are performing martial arts... etc.)  but within reason they are tough enough to stand up to class after class of use.

One of my favorite things to do is to show how one person can play an entire song with a set, and then how we can play the same song as a class with each person responsible for one note.  I usually do this with simple songs like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb.  Kids can get pretty excited over a discovery that they can all be part of making the music together (though a few get disgruntled - "Why does red get all of the notes? I'm playing pink and I only got to play once!"  I'm fairly certain these kids will never be happy with what I give them, so I just try to make sure no one kid is stuck with one color all the time).

A while back I created a Powerpoint to help introduce my students to the Boomwhackers.  The goal was to establish my own procedures as well as get them comfortable with using the tubes properly, waiting their turn, following the directions for when to play, etc.  You can find that Powerpoint in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

This school year, I decided I would take that idea one step further.  I created a Powerpoint for Mary Had a Little Lamb using the same process - one color per slide, advance through the slides steadily to get the kids to play the tubes in the right order.  This led to a realization of a problem.  Even if I am advancing the slides to a steady beat, there was no cue to get the kids to play on the beat. I had to go through it a lot to get to a point where they knew what came next in order to have some semblance of beat.

This just wouldn't do.

Instead, I created a system of "notation" that uses colored squares and rectangles to indicate which tube plays and for how long.  It allows the kids to look ahead at what's coming, and seems to do a great job of prepping them to move into regular notation.  It also has the side benefit of not being a cutesy picture of some clipart bumblebee and heart and sun in place of real notes.  I am not a fan of those.   I created a song collection using this method of progressively arranged tunes.  You can find that collection here.  It includes the songs Hot Cross Buns, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Clair de Lune, Go Tell Aunt Rhody, Frere Jacques, London Bridge, and Old MacDonald.  Each song takes up one slide, and is readily approachable by even the youngest of elementary students.

My goal is to create a series of song collections, and then offer them all bundled together at a discount.

If you have another way of using Boomwhackers please feel free to leave a comment.  Even better would be if you use my Powerpoints let me know how you used them and how it went!

Feeling a little Orff today...

One of my goals for this year is to incorporate more time for actually making music.  To create rather than follow along, especially when it's something the kids are coming up with themselves.  To that end, I decided that the best way to get more playing time was to have my room set up such that the instruments are more accessible.  Unfortunately my room really isn't spacious, so coming up with a way to have all of my Orff instruments set up all the time is an ongoing battle.  For the moment, what I have done is flip some of the major components of my classroom to the other side of the room, spread some of the larger furniture out, and make things fit where they can.

It's still a work in progress.

However, I have had some initial success with the setup, though it requires constant tweaking at this stage.  Here is one of my fourth grade classes enjoying their instrument time.

I didn't cover up anyone's face, this is how they all really look! :)

I have 3 glockenspiels, 2 soprano xylophones, a soprano metallophone, 3 alto xylophones, an alto metallophone, 2 bass xylophones and a bass metallophone.  Since there obviously aren't enough mallet instruments for everyone, I've been having the kids that weren't on mallets play Boomwhackers.  I was playing the conga to (try to) keep everyone together on the steady beat.  Surprisingly, I'm finding that what I play has to be a bit more complicated and rhythmic for it to have any bearing on what the kids do. And unfortunately what they do almost without exception is speed up.  A lot.  So the more I play something resembling a rock or funk groove the more likely they are to stick with one tempo.  Go figure.

And speaking of Boomwhackers, I have finally found a good way to store mine.  A huge thanks to Pinterest! Ok, so really it is from Music With Mrs. Dennis, who got it from Rainbows Within Reach.  But Pinterest was where I saw it first. The school where I used to teach had two complete classroom sets of boomwhackers, which was glorious.  The other music teacher at the school had hers stored in a tall plastic wrapping paper bin that resembled a tall skinny trash can.  I liked the idea, but felt that there had to be a better way.  While the bin kept everything protected, it took a little more work to get the Boomwhackers in and out than I would like.  When I changed schools, I was thrilled to find a class set of Boomwhackers in my classroom.  But they were stored in a large Panera bag.  I still get irked thinking about that darn bag (and not just because someone went to Panera without me!). For a year I fought with it, it got mangled and slightly more ripped than it was.  And that just won't do.  So naturally, I turned to the internet for a solution.

Cereal boxes!  Go figure! I brought three boxes from home (ok, one is a cereal box, one is for fruit snacks, and the other was for Tabasco flavored Cheez Its - YUM!), and put out an email to the staff asking for donations.  So far two teachers have donated to the cause, so now I only need one more box!  I folded the top flaps inward, which hold the Boomwhackers upright and in place.  The cereal/fruit snack/Cheez It boxes keep them separated by color and all organized.

 

I put the smaller boxes into an empty printer paper box.  Further proof that there are better things than the trashcan.  Once I get  the last cereal box I need I will organize the boxes by size so that the larger Boomwhackers are in the bigger boxes, so on and so forth.  Then I'm planning on putting color coordinated construction paper on each box to make it obvious where each color goes.  Last I will probably coerce ask someone more artistic than myself (probably the Art teacher!) to decorate the outside of the newly paper-clad big box. I might even have some of the kids do it.  Hmm.....  Regardless, the best thing about this particular box is that it fits into the hideous yellow cabinet in the background of the picture, so it will help store my Boomwhackers out of sight when needed!

So at the end of the day yesterday, I stood back and looked at my room.  And it was a minor disaster.  Between the bits of trash that seem to stick to kids just long enough to get in my room, the odds and ends that kids forgot to take with them (I'm pretty sure I could open a thrift store), and the instruments strewn about, something had to be done. 

So I spent 30 minutes of my Friday afternoon (after the duty day was over!) to put things in some semblance of order.  Again.

So far this is the best I've come up with.  Everything is oriented toward the Promethean board, spaced out such that the kids can all fit behind the instruments, and arranged by instrument type.  The only problem now is that this takes up more than 1/3 of my room.  If I were to leave it like this, I would have students sitting on top of glockenspiels and xylophones when they sit in their usual spots.  That's a no go.

For right now, the solution is just to have the kids tuck everything back against the bass instruments when we're not using them.  I hate that, but it's really the only way to have them out all the time.  My plan is to build carts for all of the instruments (minus the glockenspiels) so that we can just roll them into place.  Hopefully I can also incorporate storage for the bars we're not using and the mallets, too.  I got the idea from Crafty Music Teachers, and look forward to adapting their design to my needs.  But that will be for a later post.