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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Making It Work: Surviving the Last Two Weeks

making it work

Lesson Ideas to Survive (and Thrive!) Until Summer I have been watching Facebook posts and it seems that some fortunate souls are already on summer break. If you are one of them – lucky you! Some of us have a few weeks left, and others have a bit longer until we can put our feet…

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Recorder Lesson: Que Llueva

In this excerpt from Journey Around the Globe with Recorder!*, Darla Meek shares her lesson for soprano recorder, Que Llueva. This lesson includes a game, an Orff arrangement, and a contrasting section composed by the students. *Copyright © 2016 by Sweet Pipes. Used with permission. Journey Around the Globe With Recorder! is a series of 24 lessons for…

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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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