I love music! Many people say that, but really, I LOVE it! I love to sing, dance, and play music. I love it so much that in high school I somehow managed to be in choir, band, AND dance on the drill team. I also took classical piano lessons for 13 years. Music is the blood that runs through my veins.
I use music in class all the time. We sing songs, watch music videos, use Sr. Wooly for lessons and brain breaks, and create a March Music Madness bracket. Music is Rule #10 in John Medina’s book Brain Rules becauseit boosts cognition, improves our social skills by making us more social, changes our moods, and boosts our language skills. There exists a plethora of research touting the benefits of learning, studying, or using music in lessons.
Click here to go to the TPT site and purchase this unit for your upper level students.
My students already love this song (it won last year’s MMM bracket) and can sing the chorus from memory, so we are flying through the materials. One of the readings included in the unit is just slightly above their level (more than i+1) so I created a powerpoint to pre-teach some of the vocabulary. I realized when creating the slides that I own one of the instruments mentioned in the reading, a guacharaca (I actually own TWO!).
So yesterday I dug them out and today I demonstrated their use in class. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it last year. Well, actually I do. We were busy struggling through the reading because I didn’t pre-teach any of the vocabulary. As such, it didn’t occur to me to bring out the instruments – but at least I learned from my mistakes!
I was expecting a lot of fun in class today, but what transpired was magical! Just seeing the instruments brought smiles to their faces. When I passed them around, body language loosened up. Eventually, everyone had the opportunity to touch/make a sound out of the guacharacas. Then inspiration struck! I remembered that I have a bag of toddler instruments from my days of teaching Kindermusik. Total game changer!! I suggested we play classroom instruments along with the video of Robarte un beso a la Jimmy Fallon… and it happened – PURE JOY!
I introduced each instrument by demonstrating its use and watched as hands eagerly went up to get to play that instrument. Once everyone had one, I played the video and grabbed my phone to get some recordings.
John Medina is correct: my students became more social, instantly had better moods, and were much more receptive to the remaining lesson. Kids who haven’t cracked a smile these first few weeks were grinning ear to ear today. Others were dancing and singing. Everyone was having a good time. It was a super opportunity to build community and trust. We don’t give our students nearly enough opportunities to move, be silly, and experience joy throughout their day – seeing their looks of awe and wonder when they were handed instruments made ME feel like a million bucks.
In planning lessons, it is easy to forget the simple things we can do to make learning more fun. Touching, shaking, waving, and moving our bodies and instruments to music was good, old-fashioned fun. Elementary school fun. “Back-in-the-day” fun. Plain and simple FUN.
We made some serious connections to content today that I think will be remembered for quite some time. And I have MUSIC to thank for that!
This is AWESOME!! Music is so powerful… and being able to *create* music with instruments just adds more power. I love this so much. Thank you for sharing your joy!
This is AWESOME!! Music is so powerful… and being able to *create* music with instruments just adds more power. I love this so much. Thank you for sharing your joy!