This week in Musc 373 was a fun week as well! Although, we did not do a whole lot on learning, besides watching the rest of the groups perform their lesson plans and possibly gain ideas for future lesson plans by watching them. The Social Studies group I was in went again for extra credit. Then today we did a lesson based off of tempo and dynamics and teaching kids with movement involved. This sums up what I did this week in our class.
Watching lesson plans which were pretty much views put together by everyone in the class helped imparting ideas into my mind in how things she be done in the case I had to teach a lesson plan like this someday. I learned it is better before you start reading the story to the students, to summarize what is about to be told so they can have an idea of what to listen for. Also, I learned
I learned to not make things more complicated by giving too many worksheets for the children, especially if they are around 2nd grade or lower or else it would be too much information for the students and probably wouldn't learn anything in the end. Then we learned today about how to implement teaching dynamics and tempo by having everyone sitting in a circle and passing a ball left or right and then changing directions when they notice a difference in the speed of the words or the loudness/softness of the words. At the same time, doing that, they learn to pay attention to the music more and develop skills involving listening. This is basically what was imparted into my mind from this week's class.
It is important for me to learn this information so I can be able to think more outside the box when teaching materials. It is important for children to learn this at a young age so they can develop skills earlier and quicker, especially with the activity that we did today in class, it really helps with paying attention better!
I was part of the Social Studies group so I went to the library a while back and was lucky enough to find two books related to social Studies. The first book I found was based off of the states of the United States which teaches Geography. The second book I found was a 3rd grade level book that talked about the "big city" on basically how a society works in a city. I didn't start on the lesson plan for 1 of my own books yet (I chose the "Big City" book by the way), but I worked on a lesson plan for the group project that my Social Studies group did and some of my ideas were implemented in our group lesson plan. This is generally how it got started for me.
Our teamwork was excellent for this lesson plan, everyone made sure to be on top of everything. We worked together by planning to meet each other when we were all free and it ended up being before class half the time and after class the other half. We all gave ideas to contribute to the plan and the best idea's that we all agreed on is what we chose in the end. We accomplished a lot by staying organized and not being lazy so we did not stress out on not having enough time to work on the lesson plan. There was not a whole lot of challenge to this, it was just a matter of time-constraint, since everyone is so busy, it was hard to get time to focus on this for a long time so we had to just go with what we had in the time limit we had. The most exciting part of this was actually doing our group lesson plan and playing the instruments, seeing the results of our teamwork was really satisfying. This was basically what went on during the week and described how things went as well.
Children can benefit quite a bit from all of this. They can learn how to be more imaginative and creative through this type of storytelling. Implementing music keeps them interested and entertained so they don't get bored and remember what they learned from the story. This is all I can think of right now as to why children can benefit from this lesson.
This week in Music 373, we continued learning more about adding music into storytelling. What works best in a story telling activity is making sounds to specific words that kids would know and have them play instruments when the word they picked came up. We also used garbage from our homes to make noise to a story which increases creativity. We also learned about binary form from a song we play this week. This is what we generally learned in Musc 373 this week.
During the week, we read the story "Chicken Little." In this story, all the names were in bold and we had a lot of instruments to play for each of the bolded names. The teacher would basically read a story while the listened for the names so they can play their instrument. The teacher would also have to teach a beat to the students so they can learn more about timbre and dynamics from hearing all the different sounds. Lastly, having a part in the story where everyone is involved in a "mini" orchestra would be a lot of fun for the students and learn harmony from the song. This is what we learned from the "Chicken Little" music activity.
In another activity we did, we read a story about thunder and why not to be scared of it. We brought instruments from home, such as water bottles, aluminum foil, and cereal boxes. Whenever the teacher would say a thunder-type noise, kids would become creative and make their own noise similar to thunder so the kids would have an idea of what it is like. Not only did the kids learn more creativity from this story, they learned a lot of social skills and such. They learned about emotions and family, they learned counting, science, and physics even. This is one of the other music-storytelling activities we learned this week.
The last big thing we learned was about binary form. I forgot the name of the song played, but it was a pop-type song; we went into two groups in a circle and danced in opposite directions. Binary form is comprised of two parts; A and B. Part A is the chorus-verse and part B is the refrain-verse. It is usually comprised in 8 measures per phrase. Pop, rock, and folk music are examples of types of music in binary form. This is all that we pretty much learned in this week of Musc 373.
This week im Music 373, we did more child creativity learning. First, we made our own sound effects from a story being told. Second, we sang a song repeatedly based off an older and more adult-like song. Then I just gained some personal knowledge, such as reading to a classroom. This is basically what we did this week in class.
On Monday, I read to the class a book called "The Listening Walk." Ms. Wang had us all make our own sound effect to the words she wanted us to describe which, if you put yourself in a child's perspective, helps them learn a lot in creativity. This also is very helpful in keeping the children active and interested in what is being read. This increases the children's imagination as well in thinking about how the sounds relate to the objects in real life. This is what we learned from class on Monday.
On Wednesday, we sang the song, "What Do We Do with the Drunken Sailors" and applied the same rhythm to the book, "What Shall We Do with the Boo-Hoo Baby?" The children would learn a lot about animal sounds from this book. They also learn about a baby as well from reading this story. They learn something from the singing, I can't remember what exactly Ms. Wang said in class though. I don't remember as well how this relates to "Student-centered" learning. This is what we did on Wednesday afternoon.
I overall got a lot of knowledge from class this week. I never got the chance to practice reading a story to an entire class until this week and now know how it is like to read in front of a class. Learning a child's perspective from story-telling is very good to know as well; you can tell if they understood and you taught the meanings right. Then we just really learned a new note on our recorder and about our 2 projects we have to start working on. This is what I learned this week in Music 373.
This week in Music 373, we learned about creativity in child development. First, there are quite a few benefits to teaching children in a creative way and is important as well. There is a certain way we can help children learn through the creative learning practice we did in class this week. Lastly, for the multicultural project, I have thought of 3 cultures to talk about, the Filipino, Vietnamese, or Japanese culture, and I have finally made my decision on what I will officially talk about. We learned a lot about being creative in class this week that will help for our future in teaching.
Teaching kids in a creative way not only helps increase their imagination, it is a much easier way for kids to be able to understand material when they can relate to it. The basic idea we learned from reading chapter 5 is how to use instruments in a way that could help the children learn. They would learn about the difference in dynamics, pitch, and melody through the music they make from the instruments. Having the children play sounds at a certain time in a certain way, they can use the sounds in their imagination and relate it to the story being told and that should teach them things such as loudness in sounds or softness in sounds in certain situations. This is why teaching children in a creative way helps develop their learning skills a lot better.
The lesson we learned in class can be very helpful with having the kids develop in their creativity levels. To start off with, we started by telling a story. Then we had more people join in by making sound effects that related to the underlined words. When someone said "at the bottom," that person would made really low sounding sound effects because the word "bottom" sounds like it would relate to a really low voice and not a high voice. The same would go for "climbing up the hill"; the other person that makes sounds for this line would make an ascending sound effect because it says "climbing up," so it would be starting off low and becoming a very high sound effect. When we do this, children can start to relate sounds and words together due to this creative way of learning.
At first I was able to think of three possible cultures to talk about because I can relate to all 3 in some sort of way. I am taking Japanese at NIU right now and have been interested in it since 7th grade. Vietnamese I'm interested in because I am part of the Vietnamese Student Association on campus so I know a little about the culture, but would like to know more. Finally, I was considering learning about the Filipino culture cause i know barely anything about it and my girlfriend plus a few other close friends are from there. In the end, I decided to go with the Japanese culture; I really want to go to Japan someday, and if I ever decided to teach there, knowing more about their culture would be the most beneficial.
This has been quite a difficult week for me for various reasons such as studying for more than 1 mid-term. I got ready for the music exam by first coming to class so I didn't risk missing any valuable information for the test. I also, printed out the study guide for this test so I would know what to study for this test. Third, I just reviewed my notes over and over so I would hopefully remember more information. This is how I got ready for the test.
The difficult part about the test was studying for it. I had way to many things going on this week so I was extremely busy. Second, I am not great at studying so being able to retain the information I go over is very difficult for me as well. I don't seem to know how to study the right way because all I do is go over my notes over and over, I don't test myself to see if I remembered it without having to look at my notes. This is what made the test difficult for me.
There are things I don't have a problem with though. Such as procrastinating; that is never a problem for me because I never wait till the last minute to do things such as studying. Next, I made sure I studied the right notes so I wouldn't be wasting my time. Third, even though studying was difficult, I made sure I made time to prepare for this test as much as I could. This is what I didn't have a problem with for the test.
My strategy to prepare for the test is quite simple. I first find a quite place I know I can study in that won't distract me too much, such as my room or my floor lounge. Then, I make myself comfortable because I know I am gonna have to focus for a certain period of time. Then I just study as best as I can for a certain amount of time each day and hope to retain a little information each day from studying so much. This is how I prepare for the test.
I learned quite a lot this semester. For example, I learned how to make a lesson plan which is extremely important for teaching a lesson in a classroom. Another important piece of information I learned so far from taking this class is how to put my mindset in a child's perspective so that I know what he/she would think when I teach him/her. The third important information I learned a lot of musical skills and concepts from taking this course as well. These are the 3 major things I learned from taking this course so far.
This past week, we all did our lesson plan presentations and were split into 2 groups to make it slightly easier on us. I found transitioning to be 1 of the most difficult parts of my presentation. I noticed I had a lot of yes or no based questions which is not something we were told to do. Although, I think I did very good on the whole singing the song and teaching it to the students part. If I were given a second chance, I would have figured out how to get my students to answer without it being a yes or no question and be able to flow very well from 1 part of my lesson to another.
Transitioning was what I had the most trouble with since I first started practicing my lesson plan. First, I didn't know how teach two different things such as rhythmic pattern and rhythm together so I had to get help on that. Second, adding questions in between the songs was difficult as well, I didn't know where or when to say them so I needed to get help on that as well. Finally, the hardest part was going from the end of the lesson to the closure, I could not figure out how to involve everyone after teaching them how to do the song. Thanks to Ms. Wang though, even though I wasn't perfect, I was able to improve so much due to her help and advice.
I noticed after my lesson plan was over, that I had too many yes or no questions. Even though I was teaching 1st graders, I should not have assumed they'd be able to know everything by themselves and would have gotten no where fast. For example, when I asked the question, "How does a dog shake his master's hand with both paws," they most likely either would not know how to do that, or the children would do it all in different ways than the one I wanted to demonstrate so that would have turned out bad as well. Next, when I asked who knew how to spell or say BINGO's name, 1st grader's attention spans aren't as good as when they get older, even though some kids may know, some kids might not, so if I called on one of the kids that did not know, being put on the spot might embarrass them so much and get them upset which I would not want to do either. This is basically what I felt was the thing I did the worst on in my lesson plan.
I feel I did do well on the whole teaching BINGO song to my students and felt they may of had fun doing that. When I was singing BINGO then teaching them the rhythmic pattern by swaying left and right with "our paws," they had fun and were able to not get bored from singing this song. Also, I kept them active by having them clap when they spelled out B-I-N-G-O. In the very end when I included my students in the song, I feel was also a good way to keep them interested and have fun with this song. This is what I felt I did good on in this lesson plan.
If I were given a second chance, I would have made sure I asked my questions in a different way than a yes or no type of answer and fix my transitions as well. Instead of saying, who knows how a dogs sounds, I'd say 3 or 4 different animal noises and the students should be able to answer the question more easily. Second. for the way the dog shakes their masters hands, I would demonstrate a few different possibilities and the kids should be able to pick out which 1 makes the most sense. Finally, for transitioning, if I was given more time to think about it, I may be able to think of a clever way to go from 1 point to the next, I was very nervous for doing this for my first time so my thoughts went all over the place, but next time should be a little easier. This is what I would have done differently in my lesson plan.
I did Gymnastics since I was 7 years old and I pretty much stopped during my freshman year of college (I go to Northern Illinois University) because I became too busy, but I am still trying to find time to be able to go. Went to Niles West High School. I am into anime, manga, and playing video games. I also like to sing for fun.
