James Coleman
Entry 5
Music education is important to the development of the individual. There are multiple aspects of music that are intertwined with human emotion and therefore music is a unique experience for every single person. Music, while it can be an individual journey, is also used as a co-curricular subject with other content areas. Shaping up to a well-rounded curriculum allows students to go out and become active members of society, where they can use different disciplines that they were taught in music.
Music Education at all levels can be connected to literature, history, and art. Every piece or song came from somewhere and can be represented by other forms of expression as well. My classes will do projects based on the history of pieces performed in class and then units can be combined with lessons in other disciplines of history, which will combine to give a more full view of the culture of a society at any given moment in history. The expression and symbolism in music can also be paired with the literary arts, and those pieces of text can affect how students think about and perform a piece of music. Playing music is all about having a context in which to perform your pieces, and working together with other teachers to devise a curriculum that has meaningful cross-curricular connections is one of the best ways to ensure that students receive a quality education.
During my student teaching, I was able to start experimenting with implementing those cross-curricular lessons. For instance, in library class, all grades had a read aloud with the book "Ada's Violin" which is about a school in Paraguay who didn't have enough instruments for all of their students. Their town was filled with garbage, so the teacher and students from that classroom made their own instruments out of recycled garbage, and ended up going on to play at a very high level and perform on stages around the world. This lesson in recycling was spawned by the celebration of Earth Day. So, in music class, we talked about timbres and sounds of different types of instruments, and then the students all brought in trash and recycling, which they then used to invent or recreate some kind of musical instrument for their own use!
Music Education at all levels can be connected to literature, history, and art. Every piece or song came from somewhere and can be represented by other forms of expression as well. My classes will do projects based on the history of pieces performed in class and then units can be combined with lessons in other disciplines of history, which will combine to give a more full view of the culture of a society at any given moment in history. The expression and symbolism in music can also be paired with the literary arts, and those pieces of text can affect how students think about and perform a piece of music. Playing music is all about having a context in which to perform your pieces, and working together with other teachers to devise a curriculum that has meaningful cross-curricular connections is one of the best ways to ensure that students receive a quality education.
During my student teaching, I was able to start experimenting with implementing those cross-curricular lessons. For instance, in library class, all grades had a read aloud with the book "Ada's Violin" which is about a school in Paraguay who didn't have enough instruments for all of their students. Their town was filled with garbage, so the teacher and students from that classroom made their own instruments out of recycled garbage, and ended up going on to play at a very high level and perform on stages around the world. This lesson in recycling was spawned by the celebration of Earth Day. So, in music class, we talked about timbres and sounds of different types of instruments, and then the students all brought in trash and recycling, which they then used to invent or recreate some kind of musical instrument for their own use!
Artifact #1
This is a lesson plan idea utilizing technology in the classroom to enhance day to day activities and instruction.
technology_integration_lesson.docx | |
File Size: | 14 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Artifact #2
This is an improvisation lesson plan, which is just one of many possible lessons to use in helping connect the content to the students.
513_improvisation_lesson_plan_1.docx | |
File Size: | 511 kb |
File Type: | docx |