Goodbye to sixth grade Hello to fifth grade

This is always a bittersweet time for me.  I have been teaching the 6th graders for over a year, ever since last winter at this time.  At that time, they were only lowly fifth graders, the youngest students in this school.  They have grown dramatically and exponentially over the last year.  They have learned to play the piano with two hands.  They have written amazing and detailed and fascinating opera plots.  They have composed songs with both hands, and played them.  They have composed many rhythm pieces and performed many of them for the class.

Some of them have had me for three periods a day, because of tlt and enrichment classes as well as music class.  So some of them have learned many drama activities and many poems.  Some of them have practiced some plays or scenes as well with me.  I have been trying very hard to teach them so many things, but even if I were not trying that hard, they would be absorbing things without my help.  They are amazing students and I have been fortunate to have them in my class.  I will miss them, and I will miss their great minds.  I hope they visit me, and I hope that they continue to thrive for the rest of the year and BEYOND!  I APPRECIATE THE OPPORTUNITY TO HAVE WORKED WITH ALL OF THESE STUDENTS FOR THE LAST YEAR!  COME BACK AND VISIT SOMETIME.

A very fun drama game that I have not shared before ...

This drama game is called "Why are you Late?"  There are a group of "workers" who create a reason why the other worker is late.  The worker and the boss leave the room while the group decides what that reason is.  It can be obvious, or outlandish and creative and magical realistic.  When the worker and the boss return to the room, the worker faces the boss, and the boss stands with his/her back to the workers.  The worker has to guess by watching the motions and pantomime of the other workers what the reason is that he or she is late.  If the boss catches the workers doing anything other than "typing" then that worker is out.  The game ends when the worker figures out why he or she was late, or when the boss gets all the workers out.

I love this game because it takes focus for the boss to go back and forth and catch the workers at their movements.  It takes creativity to figure out what the worker's reason will be for being late.  It takes an ability to act out what happened for the workers, and it takes being able to think on the spot for the worker to figure it all out!  It has become one of the favorites of the drama class, and I think it could be one of my favorites to play with my students, because they enjoy it so much and they use their creative juices so readily.

One of the reasons a worker was late was that he was gored by a unicorn and had to go to the hospital.  Another was that the pet bird came into the room in the middle of the night and chewed through the cord of the alarm clock so it didn't go off.  You have to make it realistic enough, but also it can be completely imaginary, and it still works well.  Hope you try this and enjoy the game!

Finding an old friend/colleague

Happy New Year everyone!  I was thinking about my former life in Boston, Massachusetts, and I remembered a time when I was not working full time, and my children were only 9, 7, 5, and 2 1/2.  I was trying to sing as much as I could, but it wasn't always easy to get out of the house to do that.  My children went to a wonderful private school at the time, the Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I had met one of the other mothers of children there, who is a jazz pianist.  She had studied at Berklee College of Music and is an incredibly talented and wonderful musician.  Her name is Cathryn, and together we collaborated on a jazz recital to benefit the school and their scholarship program.

I had not thought about her for some time, although I had written her a letter many years back which was returned, so I had given up ever finding her again.  But I just decided to check on Facebook of all places to see if she might turn up there.  Well, there she was, playing her jazz piano, making cds and playing with another person.  I sent her a message on her page, and she sent me a message back!! I was totally amazed!  It has been twenty-five years since I have talked to her, but she remembered me well, and she said it was because of that recital that we did that she began playing all the time again and she hasn't stopped since!  I can't wait to find out more, and I will keep you posted!  What a delightful surprise for the new year, I will leave her interesting music and her projects with children that she has been working on since last I knew her! Enjoy!

Sound Art

Spodify

Youtube Cold Dark Matters

Literary Bingo

Last year the library came up with a cool Bingo challenge for teachers with all kinds of book genres to try and if you got a Bingo you were put in for a prize at the end of the year.  This year the challenge is slightly different, the squares have specific book titles that the library has to offer for us to read!  Go Kerri!

So I have been reading, so far, an amazing book called Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt.  It tells the heartwarming story of a middle school girl who struggles with reading and writing, and she tries to hide it, with behaviors and other strategies.  She gets a  new teacher who is really smart and cares about her success and is also studying special education so he helps her to find out about how she can learn to read better.  It turns out she has dyslexia!  She gets help and it is still a long road, but it turns out that her hard work makes all the difference in her success.  I highly recommend this book.  Here is an excerpt that I loved!

"Everyone is smart in different ways.  But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking that it's stupid." I think hard about that.  Could it be that simple? 
A mind movie flickers in my brain of an angry fish at the bottom of a tree, banging on the trunk with its fins and coplaining that it can't climb it.
I think of a turtle making a sandwich. 
A snake playing the violin.
An elephant knitting.
Penguins playing basketball.
An eagle scuba diving. 
But mostly I hope with every tiny bit of myself that Mr. Daniels is right about all of this. "

I was asked yesterday to describe Faure's music.  Gabriel Faure? How do you describe this feathery, light, cool, warm but not overly passionate music?  All these words came into my head..impressionistic, harmonically accessible without being neo-classical, forward-looking in terms of the rhythmic and musical structure, but not taking too many risks in terms of the harmonic structures.

It feels like being inside an impressionistic painting, never gives you too much emotion, always challenges you to listen closely because he makes a point of never overstating anything.  His music is not physical or highly emotional, it is more psychological and very intellectual, without being difficult to connect with.  Faure is the beginning of the impressionistic French movement, along with some other of his contemporaries.

 I highly recommend his songs which fly around everywhere and challenge the flexibility of the singer, but are also good for vocal students learning all the important skills of control and breath development.  My favorite songs of his are "En Priere", Chanson D'amour, and my favorite of all time, "Le Secret". Le Secret by Gabriel Faure, sung by Barbara Bonney

Happy New Year, and Happy Listening!!  Let me know what you think of this song, in particular!

Advisory gingerbread houses

Today is the last day to enter your gingerbread house in the first annual gingerbread contest in York Middle School, sponsored by the library staff.  Your entry had to reflect the homes of literary greats.  Therefore, we had people building the cornucopia from the hunger games, there was the grinch who stole Christmas, there was the Wizard of Oz with the rainbow and the yellow brick road, there was Rapunzel's castle, and my wonderful, thoughtful advisory did the three little pigs and the big bad wolf that would blow all the houses down.  They built the hay house out of saltines and covered them with raw spaghetti, they built the stick house out of graham crackers and pretzels, and then they built the brick house out of graham crackers and twizzlers.  There were also many small marshmallows that we put on the ground for the snow, and marshmallows around the edges of the houses to show some snow around all of them.  They also built a beautiful garden patch with skittles, and made the pigs and the wolf out of large and small marshmallows, held together by raw spaghetti pieces as well.  In the end, it was impressive!

The most impressive part of all of it, was how well they worked together.  They thought of the ideas themselves, and we voted on the gingerbread house theme so it was using the democratic process.  The students in my advisory wrote lists of what people needed to bring to work on this project during advisory times.  They doled out the work, so that everyone who wanted to played an important part.  They never shamed or made people feel guilty if they didn't want to participate, and because of it, eventually, everyone did at least one small job.  We had a little workshop going next to my desk for weeks, and I was relieved and thrilled when it was all completed and I was able to bring it up to the library for the display!  How wonderful!  

It showed me that these children are very good at conceiving of a project, problem solving, and working together to complete something that means something to them.  There is a prize of a cocoa party in the library, but for me, the prize was everyone working together, happily boys and girls gluing marshmallows down, and twizzlers on graham crackers and patiently waiting for things to dry so they could continue the process.  Congratulations to my advisory and thank you to the library staff for giving us a fabulous project to work on during the holiday season!! 

Gingerbread house video from the library! ENJOY!!

Jaguar Team Questions about "Farewell to Tarwathie"

I  noticed this week that when the Jaguar team answered questions that they had prepared for the class, they always refer back to the text, or the lyrics to the song.  When I visited the Harkness table a few weeks ago, I noticed that this was one of the expectations each day.  They are all expected to back up their answers with ideas from the text, the story, the inferences in the text.  They always share their answers with quotations from the book.  This is impressive, and it is now showing up in music class when we have these discussions.  We may not have the big table, and I don't have someone charting the course of the discussion and making sure that everyone is sharing ideas, at least a few times every session, but the rest of the method has become almost ingrained in the students' thinking and this is very exciting. You can tell that the conversation is much more animated, and the students are more and more involved and in charge of their own learning. Here are a few questions from this team that we entertained yesterday in our class discussions:

Who hunts beautiful, gentle creatures?
Were they hunting the whale for money or for food?
Are they scared or frightened?
Is their spot for hunting a whale a good spot or not?
Are they frightened or excited?
Did the crew like telling the people about their adventures?
Is this a different time signature?
Who sings the song?
What is the perspective of the song?
What is the song about?
Is the song happy or sad or both and why?
What are the instruments that are played in this song?
What did they use the whale for?
How old is the song?
When the writer was writing this song what was he thinking about?
Is his wife the whale?

I want to publicly thank my colleague Mr. Beaumier for introducing our school to this thinking and discussion process, and I look forward to having more interesting discussions beginning with questions generated from the class.  More soon!