- What are your favorite ideas for the first day of class?
- What are things that turned out to not work so well on the first day?
- What classroom prep did you do that you're really excited about? Posters, materials, etc.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
First day of school ideas
I started school here in India about 4 weeks ago, but a lot of people have their first day of school coming up soon.
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Due to school closings in my district, my school is receiving almost 200 new students from a neighboring school. I am going to focus on some "getting to know you" activities for the first week.
ReplyDeleteFor the younger students, I will put each name on an index card and scatter them on the floor.
1.Students will walk around as I play music.
2.When I stop the music, each student will stand in front of a card.
3.I will call out a name, and that student will walk around the room looking for their name.
4. When they find their name, they will say, "Hello, my name is ___. What's yours?" After the answer, they will say, "May I have my name back?" They will take their place, and the game will resume.
For older kids, I will put together a scavenger hunt with questions like, "Find someone who likes country music." Etc. First one to find them all wins.
I'm teaching discussion sections for Western Art Music History (does anyone else really want to make WAM! a mainstream abbreviation for Western Art Music?).
ReplyDeleteSo far the plan is to take care of business stuff, then break into groups and assign each group a category (timbre, melody, etc). I'll play a sample of music, then each group will discuss for 30 seconds and come up with something to report on to the whole class.
After that, I'm supposed to introduce meter, which I think will involve them dancing around the room. Does anyone have resources or guides for using Eurhythmics?
-Nell
One really good movement book is Creative Dance for All Ages, by Anne Green Gilbert. My Orff Movement instructor this summer says she is the absolute best for applying Eurhythmics to musical skills in the elementary classroom (and beyond). Anything you come across written by her is going to be quality. BrainDance is another thing she has developed, based on the natural progression of movement in Babies. It's really interesting to see that if you go through this 2 minute series of movements following the progression of natural development, students will be so much more alert and ready to go... and according to my Orff instructor, they really enjoy it, too.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Anne Green Gilbert worked with composer, Eric Chappelle, to create CD accompaniments that specifically compliment her movement activities. The series is called "Music for Creative Dance: Contrast and Continuum Vol. 1-4." Now, the newly Kodaly-crazed teacher in me cringes at these pieces a little because they sound reeeeeeeeally electronic and a little cheesy. However, they have been tried and tested over YEARS and teachers find they are the most effective thing out there for what they want to accomplish, and truthfully, they aren't THAT bad. There are a lot of examples in the vol. 1 CD (which I bought this summer) that have un-metered vs. metered examples, which you can also use to show "same/different" as you begin to prepare form.
If you want me to go into folk dance resources I could go on and on again... but I realize that's a whole separate topic from Eurhythmics. Should I elaborate on Folk Dance?
Hi Nell! What classes are you teaching? I'm a little confused :) Sounds good though!
ReplyDelete--Kate