Another fabulous day at TMEA/TI:ME National Conference! Here are some more highlights from today.

“Help! Preschool/Kindergarten Has Been Added to My Schedule!”

The day started out with an 8:30 am session in the Hyatt Ballroom titled, “Help! Preschool/Kindergarten Has Been Added to My Schedule!” It was so wonderful to see so many music educators at this session, participating, and asking me some excellent questions at the end.

The link to the Wakelet, which has the handout as well as the resources, can be found here.

The session included activities and routines to help music educators teach the youngest learners at their schools. Some items that were included here:

• Using Dr. Feierabend’s 8-step workout from First Steps for Preschool Music and Beyond.

• Creating your own workout based on his workout.

• Gathering activities from that series as well as Denise Gagne’s Musicplay and Music Together.

• Taking classes with those methods to deep dive into their materials and activities.

• Going on a theory that activities are around the one-minute per age. For example, a class of three-year-olds would have around three-minute activities. This is a theory that some educators use to base their plans and the pace of the classroom.

• Pacing movement, singing, songtale/book, instruments, steady beat, props, stuffies/puppets, throughout the class to help with the pacing.

Questions that were asked at the end?

• What is the right pace?

  • It depends on your students, how many there are, their age group, and the time of day. If they are late in the day or before lunch, you will probably pace a little faster because they are tired and hungry. And then leave more time for the songtale so that they can relax after the quick pace until the teacher comes to pick them up.

• I have 30+ young students. Do you have any tips for handing out instruments?

  • It is always a challenge when we have numerous young students and no assistant to help us. It will limit how often we use props because of the time it takes to hand them out. Plus, if you do not have the same item for each, you might have students with behavioral challenges that cannot handle yet how to cope with not getting what they want. My advice is to limit activities at this time that have props and instruments and incorporate them slowly into the activities over the next few months so that the students learn the expectations of what to do when the instruments are passed out.

• How do you handle misbehaving students?

  • At this age, I tend to redirect more often than not. Obviously, if a child is hitting another child, then you have to stop the class and you will pivot. However, if it is not a behavior involving this, then I will try the following with these popular encounters in our classroom:

    • Bathroom: Unless they are doing the “potty dance”, I tell them that they can go in a few minutes. They will usually forget and not ask again. If you have one who always goes during your class, you will have to ask the classroom teacher to assist in either making sure that they go to the bathroom before the class, or the teacher stays.

    • Won’t participate: The first class, I let that go if they will stand up when we are moving. After that, I tend to encourage them, even if it is a baby step into our activity. I do go the encouragement route because they can set off other students to not participate. I also ask the classroom teacher what their strategies are when a child will not participate in their class and follow that for consistency.

    • A lot of students: Again, I pace quickly, pass out fewer items, and have the brain break videos of GoNoodle and others, so that I can press play and they follow the teacher on the screen while I set up for the next activity.

Think Outside the Box: Fun, Relevant Movement in Music Class

This session was presented by the 2023 NJ Master Music Teacher Award Recipient, Dr. Missy Strong. In a packed ballroom, she presented movement activities that lived up to the title of the session. She showcased Dr. Franklin Willis’s stick routine (which is a favorite in many music classrooms), and movement cards to the song Happy by C2C (featuring Derek Martin). She also showed us the dance of tinikling, a Philippine folk dance involving bamboo poles, two people beating, tapping, and sliding the poles, while one or more dancers dance between the poles.

Missy reminded us of her expectations for her students. They are to be musical and never cross the line. Plus, she asked us to consider moving away from only using classical music. She encouraged us to branch out our music so that all of our students are represented in the music that we play in the classroom.

It was a fantastic session that I enjoyed thoroughly!

Teaching K-5 General Music with a Focus on SEL

Shawna Longo gave a session on how to use the Essential Elements Classroom (EEC) by Hal Leonard to promote social-emotional learning in your music class. This session gave wonderful ideas with excellent activities and questions to promote student awareness of their social-emotional learning. Though the EEC is not necessary when you want to include SEL in your music classroom, this program does help many music educators who are new to the field or those who are not sure how to incorporate SEL into their classroom.

I Feel Like Funkin’ It Up: Black Music Aesthetics in Elementary General Music.

This session was amazing. It was led by their featured elementary music clinician, Dr. Loneka Wilkinson Battiste. She spoke about what Black Music Aesthetics is and talked about the heterogenous sound is ideal in African American music. She also spoke to Black music being about the way that it’s performed and the way that it’s listened to. She did a wonderful job connecting with everyone in her audience. For me, the “aha” moment was when she spoke about the folk song, Lil’ Liza Jane. She told us how when she was in elementary school, her music teacher had the students perform a ta ti-ti rhythm pattern with the song. When they performed it, it was very simple and the rhythms made the music very straightforward, and almost march-like.

Once you change the accompaniment rhythm with syncopation, polyrhythms, melodic embellishment, and body movement, the song took on a whole new sound and meaning.

She finished with a “Now you wild out” rap game where there are two teams and there is a hip-hop beat playing. One group throws humorous shade at the other group in the style of rap and ends with, “Now you wild out”. The other group has to throw humorous shade back at the first group, and end again with “Now you wild out”. She introduced this with a game-show-style clip. This would hook in your shyest of students and get them thinking ahead, rapping to rhythm, and participating as an ensemble. and improvising. It was a definite keeper!

One more day to go!