Grand Opening!

Greetings, and welcome to the Mobile Music Mansion! I am Mr. Earley, and I will be your host here at this blog.  This is my third or fourth attempt at a blog, and I think I may have finally decided on something that was worthwhile enough to keep updating - music education, and more specifically, my classroom!  

Currently I teach in Southern Maryland at a small elementary school of about 270 students.  My classroom is a trailer *ahem* learning cottage that I have dubbed the "Mobile Music Mansion."  My students think it's just a goofy name.  The parents and other staff members generally seem to find it quite humorous.  Personally, I thought it was a stroke of brilliance, but I may be slightly biased.  

So, what might you find here?  Well, my hope is to keep current on the goings-on in my classroom and how I apply my personal music education philosophy to the day to day things that make up an elementary music classroom.  Since I teach total program (general music, band, strings, and chorus), I unfortunately don't have room in my schedule for Pre-K, but I do teach grades Kindergarten through 5 all day, every day Monday through Friday.  I love to hear classroom teachers grip about how 25 kids is too many; I just respond with how my 270 are a good number!

I will be posting some pictures of my classroom setup soon, along with a few projects and ideas that I will be trying out in the coming months.  Hopefully running this blog will be a motivator to stretch my comfort zone with that sort of thing.

I am a pinner on Pinterest, and as soon as I figure out how I will post a link to my boards there. (Edit - I figured it out - http://pinterest.com/natebone)

I also have a store on Teachers Pay Teachers where I post music-education related items that can be purchased and downloaded. If you are a music teacher who hasn't been to TpT, I highly recommend it.  There are tons of great resources, and lots of freebies!  Soon I will also be posting examples and samples of some of the items I have available in my store, so be on the lookout!  For starters, how about a poster to help motivate students to practice?

 

The information in these posters is something I worked out based on Malcolm Gladwell's "Rule of 10,000."  I hope I did the math correctly, if not, could someone please let me know?  I would be most grateful!

Well, that's it for this first update.  I'm looking forward to sharing my thoughts here, and hopefully hearing from others, whether they are music teachers, music students, or just wanderers or the internet (perhaps arriving through the series of tubes...).