My first practicum experience was with Mrs. Kari Carpenter at Mountain View Elementary School. I did not quite know what to expect, but I came into the school with an open mind. The elementary general music class had just come from an assembly where a magician performed some tricks about books. Mrs. Carpenter knew about this, and actually opened the floor for the students to discuss their experience before class. This was a great activity for many reasons. The students were able to share their favorite parts, and laugh with each other about the memories they had just created. Not only that, but the discussion at the beginning of class definitely lessened the amount of extra discussion between the students for the remainder of the class, because they had already told their stories to each other! She then had the students get their assigned ukuleles off of the wall in the back. They were numbered, and every student knew his or her assigned number very easily. This must be something that they do a lot in the class! At this point, as the students sat back down, we, the MUED students, were invited to grab a ukulele, and join their circle on the ground. We were able to help her as she tuned instruments, reviewed chords, and even taught new chords to them as we sang through a popular song. At this point, Mrs. Carpenter would get occupied with certain situations (in this case, an extremely out of tune ukulele), and would allow the students to get louder in volume and more rambunctious. However, as soon as she was not preoccupied, they knew to settle down and work to focus on the activity at hand. After this, they listened to The Addams Family Theme Song, responded to it, and then proceeded to learn the bass line and snap(s) part to the song on the xylophones. This took an immense amount of classroom management as well, as there were two students at each xylophone. This observation at Mountain View taught me so much about the importance of classroom management. The ability to set standards of behavior for your students while they are in your classroom is important, but being able to enforce those standards so diligently is essential for the overall success of a classroom. Because of Mrs. Carpenter’s ability to keep students occupied, and using different pedagogical strategies for classroom management, she played a huge role in ensuring their success in learning during her lesson. During the observation, however, she also informed us that she planned too much into one day. It is always great to plan ahead, but sometimes it may hinder learning in the slightest. Trying to fit too many educational activities into a small amount of time may be efficient, but may also not gurantee that a student is fully understanding the material at hand because of the fast pace of the lesson. Students need reflection time, and some guiding questions to help them process the meaning of activities like these. Overall, my experience with Mrs. Carpenter at Mountain View Elementary was fantastic. I enjoyed learning so many beneficial things from her class!
MUED271Keister 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! #MUED271Being a Leader has always been an important concept me. I grew up being the oldest child out of a family of 10 cousins. Through this, my entire life has consisted of leading and being a role model for my younger relatives. This accustomed me to leadership without even realizing it.
As I grew older, I exposed myself to different opportunities as my passion for leadership grew. In High School, I was Drum Major for two years. This position was a heavy responsibility. Our band was going through dramatic changes and hard times, and I felt the responsibility to be a kind, graceful being for the sake of the band. This position taught me not only how to teach music and conduct in front of a marching band, but also how to be a friend, role model, and advice-giver. Every person in the band knew that I was there for them. I had to stay positive through all of the negativity, no matter how difficult it was. I had been told that I was the face of the band, and that's what I pushed myself to become. Flash forward to present day. As a sophomore, I am currently an Alto Saxophone Visual Section Leader for the MRDs. This experience, so far, has already taught me about myself as a leader. I am still strongly focusing on my attitude to the rest of my section. If I’m not enjoying rehearsal time, how can I expect them to? I try my hardest to be an empathetic leader, and to lead by example. Even in past examples, my efforts were toward every kinds of student with ranging abilities, (http://ericaunroe.weebly.com/leadership/making-making and http://ericaunroe.weebly.com/leadership/experience-remix) As the years went by, I realized that being a Leader is much more than waving your hands and talking about articulations. It’s also about being a role model for everyone that looks up to you. As I advance into my teaching, I hope to strengthen my ability to be a good example for everyone that I encounter, students or not. Aside from the emotional aspect of being a leader, there are still goals in mind to be improved on by the time I graduate from JMU. I feel that I can definitely improve my teaching skills. I still tend to get nervous in front of a group of people. This is a natural reaction, it happens no matter how comfortable I am with the people I’m leading. I feel that this reaction will become less and less with more practice, which I will have a fair amount of in the very near future. Nevertheless, leadership is my passion, and has been since I can remember. I love being a role model, and getting to teach others about music, while still being a friend to others and someone to look up to when they need one. MUS150In class, my partner, Devina, and I, chose to go with the first prompt about the disabled student in band class. Even though our experiment was designed for this prompt, it could have gone well with the second one too. We figured that since our subject would have limited capabilities and musical knowledge, we could create something with everyday objects that were easily recognizable to everyone. We set up many ordinary things on a piece of cardboard. We used things like play doh, tin foil, washers, hangers, and even screws to make up our instruments. By taping them to the cardboard and hooking the makey makey wires up, we created our instrument. We associated the size of our objects with the pitch of the notes. The lower notes were represented by bigger objects, and the higher notes were the smaller ones. We figured this could be very easy to someone with limited musical knowledge because usually, lower noises are associated with larger objects, and vice versa.
In a listening-based experience with middle schoolers, we could sit them all down, and instead of having a regular band class, we could expose them to scratch and makey makey. We could set up different inanimate objects like food or toys or anything of the sort, and associate them with different loops and beats. This way, the middle schoolers can learn that theres much more to music than just notes on a page. This will also help the kids that may not enjoy band as much as others. They will have their minds opened to the endless possibilities that come with learning music. Not only will this experiment open their musical minds, but it will also give them a break from their average band class that they might not always look forward to. We could set up the program on a smart board so they can all hear and see what is occuring, let them come up in small groups and add loops or beats until they come up with a finished product. This will teach them that creativity is a great thing, it has no boundaries, and that it's okay to make mistakes, as long as they're good, meaningful ones. This will hopefully cause them to leave the band room feeling excited and refreshed. They would be able to go home to their parents or non-band friends and tell them about the "super cool" experiment they did in band class that day. I know as a middle schooler, I would have thought an activity like that was astonishing. For a more non-formal community aspect, you could incorporate things that everyone can do, whether they have musical knowledge or not. We could create squares of tin foil connected to the makey makey and scratch, that when someone steps on them, (like Dance Dance Revolution-style), it would make different beats and loops. (trying to stay away from notes here, these people probably won't know much about that.) Also, because we're trying to reach a very diverse audience, in addition to the DDR floor mats, we can code scratch to create sounds by detecting movement. Not all of our subjects may have the ability to make the floor tiles work. Because of this, we will be able to reach a vast audience whether they can move, read music, or have any musical knowledge or not, they will be able to enjoy and interact with this experience. As for a more advanced group of subjects, such as an honor band, you have many more musical possibilities because of how much knowledge the students have for music. A very effective activity to put together could be to take a piece of a piece that the band may be struggling with, and connect the scratch/makey makey program (on different instruments) to some inanimate objects. Since these subjects actually have musical knowledge, they could read the music and play the parts on the inanimate objects/scratch instruments (depending on what instrument the certain part is written for). And then compiling all of the different parts into one piece of music, like a score. This could be a lesson for them in many ways. 1.) It will familiarize them with the part they are struggling with by making them create the same part with different objects that they aren't particularlu familiar with when it comes to making music 2.) Show how important each individual part is, and why it's so important to have those parts prepared. 3.) Also emphasize, however, how all of the parts fit together to make one big piece of music. |
EricaThis page will be for videos of myself teaching, lesson plans, and reflections. Archives
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