Music

Week 5

Thursday 5^th April 2012

In our first music workshop, I learnt that it is really important to find good pieces of music to build on students’ repertoire. And this can be done through a listening lesson by asking students to listen out for the duration (which involves the length of the song, note, rhythm and beat) and the pitch (which includes the patterns in harmony and the high and low sounds). The tempo of the piece, the notes, the counts and the rhythm, if they changed throughout the piece and the purpose of the change can also be explored as it encourages students to appreciate how and why the music was composed. Music is a great way to analyse the way moods, ideas and feelings are expressed, it encourages appreciation and respect for diversity and can be used to alert students and/or settle and calm a class (Gibson, 2011, p.112). I also learnt that good pieces of music can be found from movie soundtracks such as Harry Potter and Shrek, YouTube, Garageband, musicals and Broadway.

Week 6

Thursday 19^th April 2012

In today’s lesson, we focused on singing. I learnt that vocal warm ups such as the tongue exercise and the lips exercise helps students improve on their techniques and skills, warms up their vocal chords, allows them to work on their articulation techniques such as their scales, assists agility and flexibility and extends their vocal ranger higher or lower. As Gibson (2011, p.110) explains, music engages us emotionally and intellectually and it is best learned when children are young. To help students in gaining and building musical knowledge and understanding, in Early Stage 1, simple rhythms, repetitive phrases and singing songs in unison would be taught in a narrow note range. For example, songs from The Wiggles could suit Early Stage 1 students if they were learning about the beach. 

I would teach and encourage students to commit to learning a song. And in this workshop today, I learnt that schools can register for Music for Life, which provides a resource kit with lesson plans and a song to sing. It is also a great way to encourage students to sing.

Week 7

Thursday 26^th April 2012

In this lesson, we focused on Performing and Playing. We were given a maraca, tambourine or wooden percussion. We listened to the piece of music we would be playing to give us a sense of the rhythm and beat and to hear the style. In the classroom, while students listened to the music, I would also use a pointer so they could also follow the sheet music. When the instruments are given out to students, I could play the music again and ask them to listen out for their own instrument. I would demonstrate the rhythm before students play and demonstrate how to play then have students mouth the beat/rhythm before they play. I also learnt that there are a range of ipad apps and websites such as: Finger Stomp, Singing Fingers and writestuffmusic.com which allows students to interact with music. As Ewing (2011, p.37) states experimenting with sounds and rhythm stimulates creativity and can help to develop flexibility in thinking.