Making It Work: Positive Procedures (updated)

positive procedures

Positive Procedures As you anticipate returning to the classroom this fall, do you find yourself  wondering how to better manage student behavior? Are you asking yourself  how to get your students to stay engaged with your lessons and stop all of that  talking and goofing around? Harry Wong states in his book, ​The First Days…

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SLOs for Orff Inspired Teaching

SLOs for Orff Inspired Teaching

SLOs for Orff Inspired Teaching Student Learning Objectives: A Manageable “How To” Guide from the Trenches   The process of crafting an SLO when kept logical and reasonable, can really be a positive force in your instruction and beneficial for your students. Don’t let the structure, all of the “official-ness” of the forms, and evaluation…

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Making It Work: Positive Procedures

positive procedures

Positive Procedures As you anticipate returning to the classroom this fall, do you find yourself wondering how to better manage student behavior? Are you asking yourself how to get your students to stay engaged with your lessons and stop all of that talking and goofing around? Harry Wong states in his book, The First Days…

Read More

Making It Work: Long Range Planning

music calendar

Making It Work: Getting Started With Long Range Planning When I began my teaching career I was working in a large county school district, on a cart, in three schools with almost no resources before the dawn of the Internet. I would hear about teachers who were “long range planning” and was completely mystified as…

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Build Your Instrument Inventory: A Five Year Plan

Build Your Instrument Inventory: A Five Year Plan Building a quality instrument inventory can seem like a daunting task, particularly for new music educators. However, with some careful thought and long-range planning, you can present a budget to acquire a full complement of Orff instruments using Brian Burnett’s five-year plan.* *All model numbers are based on the Studio 49 catalog. …

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Purposeful Pathways Lesson: Fais Dodo

We hope you and your young students enjoy this Fais Dodo lesson taken from Purposeful Pathways: Possibilities for the Elementary Music Classroom, Book Two – by BethAnn Hepburn and Roger Sams. Designed to encourage active music making, this lesson includes pathways to meter, ensemble, and improvisation. Click on the link to download the lesson: Purposeful Pathways: Fais Dodo.

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Reflect and Refine: A Realistic Approach to the New School Year

Contributed to AOSA.org by Beth Melin Nelson, AOSA Teacher Educator I distinctly remember the start of my first school year after taking Level I. Armed with two weeks of Orff Schulwerk education, I was eager to recreate these experiences in my own classroom. I wanted to provide my students with meaningful Orff Schulwerk lessons that…

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Creative Classroom on a Budget

Fact #1: Teachers don’t make a lot of money. Fact #2: Most, if not all, teachers spend their own money on resources and supplies for their classroom. Wouldn’t it be great if a store existed where you could buy a lot of things for your classroom and spend very little money? With just a little…

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Purposeful Pathways Lesson: Old Mother Brown

We hope you and your young students enjoy this Old Mother Brown lesson taken from Purposeful Pathways: Possibilities for the Elementary Music Classroom, Book Two – by BethAnn Hepburn and Roger Sams. Designed to encourage active music making, this lesson includes pathways to pitch, literacy, composition, rhythm, and ensemble. Click on the link to download the lesson: Purposeful…

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Lesson: Haiku Inspired Creative Movement

Using the beautiful and spare language of haiku as a model, students create movement compositions that become a “score” for instrumental pieces. This lesson is suggested for upper elementary or middle school students who are mature enough to grasp the intent of haiku: to express a big (and sometimes emotional) experience in a very few…

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