Keister Music Night was a wonderful experience. Keister Elementary School has a music program run by Mrs. Hagy (http://web.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/kes/). The Music Night is for students of all ages to come together and experience many different musical activities created by JMU Music Education students. For our project, Alexis Anderson (alexisandersonmusic.weebly.com) and I were assigned to a Kindergarten room. Along with this, we also had to create our project around a pre-determined National Core Music Standard. (http://www.nationalartsstandards.org/) Our standard was the first one. Which stated that students will “generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work”. This was a challenging idea to put forth for kindergarteners at first. I, personally, have experience with music technology, and through these experiences, I have found that this way of experiencing music is intriguing to younger children. This is where we decided to use Makey Makey and Scratch as the main component of our project. To tie in our standard, we decided that setting the Makey Makey up to drawings of orchestra instruments and assigning each drawing its own sound to correlate, we could help students conceptualize the idea of an orchestra. Along with that, and time-permitting, we would also allow the students to draw their own instruments to take home. This was not only intended to teach students about the instruments in an orchestra, (woodwinds, strings, brass, and percussion) but also to expose them to the shape of said instruments, and also teach them more about the concept and capabilities of music technology! During the event, things didn’t always quite go as planned. We hadn’t quite thought about kindergarteners deep enough to consider their ways. Every student was different. They were easily entertained, but also easily distracted; which is okay! We found ways to keep attention and introduce different activities in a timely manner. The reactions varied among students. Some were very engaged and interested, while some tried our experience, and moved on quickly. This, again, is not a bad thing. It only shows us that every human is different. Even younger ones! We also didn’t take account of how loud the atmosphere would be during the experience. There were two other projects happening in our room, along with the vocals of ourselves, the music, the students, and the parents, it got noisy! The loud space did hinder our experience a bit, but we made up for it by communicating with the kids and parents about the shape of instruments, and the technology, along with the sound that they made. There were also varying reactions to our experience. Some students were amazed by the “magic” of music, while some ended up a little frustrated at some points. The parents as well; some were curious as to how the technology worked, and how we got the sounds to play through our laptop. I am very thankful for the opportunity to get our feet wet with kindergarteners at Keister Music Night. I had personally never introduced music technology to a large group of young kids, but it was a great experience! Overall, the students, along with Alexis and I, had a great amount of fun conducting this experience! #MUED271Comments are closed.
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EricaThis page will be for videos of myself teaching, lesson plans, and reflections. Archives
February 2020
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