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!