Fifth Grade Week Two

Every year at this time of the year I have to learn more than a hundred new names, and more than a hundred new personalities and learning styles.  I find it exhilarating, and often, quite exhausting.  I am back to fifth grade again, and must customize my teaching to all those new students and their abilities to learn new musical ideas.  I begin with a creative project, but sometimes creativity is easier for some students than for others.  I teach them about dynamics, and then they have to discover the possibilities of the keyboards and use all the dynamics and create a piece of music with them.

This is a new project, that I started last year.  The group last year never questioned the idea of writing down music any way they chose, but this year is different.  Many of the students have no idea how to hear a melody in their heads, and very many of them, even if they have an idea, don't know how to make up a way to write it down.  I have told them they can use pictures, numbers, letters, words, directional signals, anything they want, but they still don't understand.  This is problem-solving 101, this is creativity 101, this is figuring out how to remember something that works for you, but they don't HAVE to remember anything, it is all at their fingertips.  It is a little frustrating, which is why I am writing about this, but that being said, I am not giving up on this assignment, because it is an enlightening and fascinating entree into a group of students.  You get to see who is organized, who is focused, who needs a lot of help, who gets lost in the shuffle, and it is easy to figure out who will need the most attention going forward for the rest of the year.  A social, psychological, musical, creative diagnostic..it works for sure!!