Musical Concepts.

3. (30 points) Teachers can set the stage for students to develop concepts about aspects of music.  For one of the music classes that you teach, describe four musical concepts that you want to students to acquire more fully.  In addition, describe what you as a teacher would do to promote the development of each of the concepts you listed.

Our textbook described a number of musical concepts and the order in which they should be learned: volume, timbre, tempo, duration, pitch, and harmony.  For this blog post, I will be discussing what concepts my class should learn and what I will do to promote the development of the concepts.  I will be talking about my Kindergarten class.

When my students come to me in the beginning of the year, some of the Kindergarten students may have had some musical exposure while in Pre-School and some may not have had any.  I treat the students as though they were a blank slate and none of them know any musical concepts.  My Kindergarten students first work on volume: loud or soft.  We use a number of lessons to teach loud vs. soft.  The students explore loud vs. soft with their voices when we discuss inside vs. outside voices, speaking vs. whispering, etc.  They will then learn songs and sing the song either loud or soft.  We then transfer that concept to instruments and students  can play drums either loud or soft and then wood blocks either loud or soft.

When I see students in the hallway or lunch room I make sure to compliment them on their "soft, indoor voices" and when I see them outside, screaming and having fun at recess, I compliment them on using a "loud, outdoor" voice outside.  

After we learn volume, we move onto timbre.  Students determine the differences in the sounds of different instruments.  We talk about how a drum sounds different than rhythm sticks because of their size, shape, and the material they are made from.  Students learn wood vs. skin vs. metal.  I love to play a game with the students where I hide behind the piano with a number of instruments.  I will play an instrument and students must raise their hands to tell me what instrument I played.  I also do metal vs. wood vs. skin.  Students must tell me what material they are hearing.

We then move onto tempo.  My students start out with slow vs. fast and to do this we feel the tempo in our bodies by moving to music.  In addition we do a unit using the tortoise and the hare.  Then we start to put labels to the tempo: presto vs. largo.  We add in more tempi as we go through the year and during the rest of their time in music class with me as well (as they progress through the grades).

The next thing we do is duration.  My Kindergarten students come to me not understanding short vs. long.  They will play a steady beat to a piece of music but not realize when it is appropriate to stop playing (at the end of a song).  I do a lot of "Freeze" with them on the instruments to get them to play short.  In addition, I use vocal exploration powerpoints.  There are lines or dots that the students must follow with their voices.  If it's made of dots, the students use short sounds.  If it is made of lines, the students use long sounds.  Students will then get to great their own vocal explorations and perform them for the class.  I do this with my Pre-K students as well and the pre-k teachers are now doing that in their own classrooms.  

Just like with the loud vs. soft, I try to compliment my students on all these concepts if I see them both in the music room and also in other areas of the school such as the hallway, lunch duty, and recess.  The students try to be good examples because they know they might get a compliment.