Journal 12

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!

Journal 11

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.