Newsletters

Music and the Brain Newsletter No. 5 – December 2001

Dear Music and the Brain Teachers,

Happy Holidays to everyone! I hope you all have a relaxing and restorative vacation. I wanted you to have this newsletter before the holiday break so you would havetime read it at your leisure. This edition is full of good ideas for games,thoughtful solutions to problems and questions posed by your colleagues. Your responses to any of the information presented would be greatly appreciated!

Keep your Expectations High  Don’t understimate your classes' ability to absorb information. Sometimes you get the answers you are seeking but more often than not your children will amaze you. For example,don't just hold up one rhythm card and be satisfied -- throw many rhythm cards at your classes. Try four in a row. Vermell Rhodes at PS 46 does a series of cards, one after another in rhythm without stopping. It keeps the children concentrating and thinking ahead. It's amazing how successful they are. Doing several cards in a row also helps to establish a steady beat. (If you want to teach changes in tempo, you still need to have several measures in each tempo.)

Interns are there to teach. Co-teaching can be a challenging concept to actually put into practice, but by sharing teaching responsibilities, teachers are given the chance to observe their students at work and better evaluate what concepts are getting across and what things may need more emphasis. We provide you interns with the understanding that they will share the teaching responsibilities. That doesn't mean holding posters during a lesson or leading the class through 3 rhythm cards. Interns are also not there just to help in the keyboard lab. All of our interns are experienced musicians with degrees in performance and/or music education.

They may not have a lot of classroom teaching experience, but many of them are naturals. Another teacher's voice and way of explaining concepts can be refreshing for students. Sharing a lesson can help keep it interesting. If an intern's first couple of lessons are not completely successful, don't give upon them. Allow them the opportunity to practice and improve. Enjoy the freetime to rest your voice.

On another note - please notify interns in advance when classes are cancelled or if you are ill. Often times a call at 8 am is too late. Also, interns are not paid to help withgeneral music assembly preparation. If your class time will temporarily be taken up with these responsibilities, let your intern know and they will besent on an alternate assignment.

Teacher Feedback We receive lots of very helpful information about the program from interns, but almost nothing, excluding a few of you, from the certified teachers. Please write to us with questions, experiences, ideas and problems at brainmusic@aol.com.

Paris Update Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Lisha visited our Music and the Brain bi-lingual Montessori schools in Paris. They are all doing very well. Deborah Nomani of PS130 is spending the year in Paris getting the program started. Even the3-year-olds are doing well with the program.

Conducting Maria Schwab at PS 150 got us turned on to the powers of conducting last year, and now some of you have tried it in your classrooms. We received a very positive report from Eudella Grant and Darrell Babidge at PS 36 that it was a big hit! The children caught on very quickly and were extremely successful with the beat patterns. "Even when they lost the 4/4 pattern, most of them would naturally find the down-beat."

Intern Report The majorityof you have been sending robust, interesting emails full of insightful questions, valid criticisms and good observations of activities that might be useful to other teachers. Thank you! Your feedback is invaluable! Some of you still need to delve deeper when writing your reports. Don't simply list the events of the week. Think critically about what lessons worked and didn't work and why, how individual children are progressing, what could be done to help explain a difficult concept, etc.

Should my classes play perfectly? There is a natural tendency to want every child to perfect each song before continuing on to the next song in the book. The truth is that spending too much time on a song results in the children getting bored. The idea ofMusic and the Brain is not for each child to play keyboard perfectly, but tolearn the musical concepts that the songs help to illustrate. Unless you arepreparing your classes for a special concert or event, don't worry about perfection. Move through the material at a good pace. (One song every one ortwo lessons, or even two songs in one lesson if they are easy or very similarlike "Grasshopper" and "Frog Jumps Down".) The children will improve with consistent modeling and correction at the keyboard, but their desire to learn keyboard at all can wane if classes become tedious.

Performing 

Having children perform for the class can be a very positive part of the lesson. Learning what it's like to bea performer and an audience member is a valuable lesson. Performing can also bea self-esteem builder when children feel ready to share their work with others,and receive positive recognition for their accomplishment. On the other hand, having children play in front ofthe class before they have had a chance to practice and prepare can be very frustrating and humiliating for them. It is not useful to the child performing or the children listening. It would seem to discourage rather than encourage their desire to play. Children should not be encouraged, not forced, to perform. When children perform it is not necessary for an entire song to be played. This can take too long. Try allowing several children to each play one line. (Robin, at Midtown West, sometimes has one row of kids play a line of the songs and the next row plays the next line.)

Is proper hand position important? Good hand position makes playing easier and helps the children succeed at the keyboards. Try to get the children to keep their fingers rounded and relaxed. Point out that if they hold their fingers straight the thumb and pinky will not reach the keys. Save them future frustration by consistently modeling and discussing good hand position. If a child is having trouble I sometimes tell them, " Do you want to know a good trick that musicians use to making playing easier? Rest all your fingers lightly on the correct notes, one finger for each white key, fingers curved and resting on the wide part of the white keys. (I model the correct position on their keyboard.)To play, just press down and lift up the correct finger without moving it off the key, that way you will never hit the wrong note or have to spend time looking down to find the correct note. Your fingers will always be in the right place." The children think it's cool to hear a "musician'strick" and they usually play better.

However, you should never stop the enjoyment of playing by scolding the child for playing with the wrong finger or holding their hands the wrong way. (And there really is no ONE way. Just as there are several things one can do wrong, there are several right ways. Ask ten piano teachers...) Simply correct the hand position or suggest that they use all five fingers the next time that they try it. Correct fingering takes along time to perfect - give them the time to work it out. With adequate time at the keyboards to, they will see for themselves that playing with all the fingers makes the playing easier.

Questions

1)Bilingual/ESL classes: what is the best approach? It's hard to know if children don't understand the lesson or the language.   2) Without guidance or some way to check performance, less motivated children fall behind. How could we make sure students stay on task during individual practice time?   3) At PS 150, Paul Madden and Lucian Ban tried to change the tempo of rhythm cards and the children found it very difficult. What is a good way to teach that the relationship of rhythms remain the same even at different tempos? This would bea good thing to address.   4) Some teachers are integrating Book 2 and Book 3 when appropriate. Is that a good thing? How have you integrated them?

Fun Music Tools!

BoomWhackers are cool, colored plastic tubes of different lengths and colors that make a pitch when"whacked" on a hand, the floor, a child's knee, anything. Their different lengths and colors correspond to different pitches and can be incorporated into any lesson. They can be ordered in diatonic and chromatic scales.

Nicole Becker's Build a Measure Cards: Notes of all durations are drawn on cards of various sizes corresponding to their length. The cards are made so that 4 quarter note cards fit into 1 whole note card, 4 dotted quarters into 3 half notes etc. Nicole made them for 4/4. 3/4, 6/8, and 6/4. Children can use them to build rhythms for clapping and try to challenge other students, or a teacher can ask a group of children to build two measures of 3/4 with the correct number of beats. Then the cards become a puzzle where the children have to find the note cards that fit into the space of three beats. These cards are easy to make and a great tool for understanding time signatures and the concept of measures as well as reviewing basic note duration.

MichelleTurner just got a slide whistle to use during music and it's great! The children are fascinated by it and think it is very funny. Ear-training and pattern recognition automatically become fun when the slide whistle in involved.

Robin Casey at Midtown West has large posters of the keyboard with and without letter nameswritten on the keys. They are great tools for explaining skips and leaps, how to find sharps and flats and new hand positions. A keyboard poster would be easy to make.

Stories from the Field (A Season of Games)

MusicSymbol Tick Tack Toe from PS 11: Draw a Tick Tack Toe and put a musical symbolin each square. The children play the game normally, but in order to claim the square they want, they have to identify the musical symbol and explain it correctly.

Shinya's game with rhythm cards: divide the class in half, the two groups facing each other. Show one half of the class a rhythm card and have them clap it. The other half claps it back. (The first group's clapping must be clear and accurate for the other group to pick up the correct rhythm.) Combine more complicated rhythms to challenge both groups, especially the group who has to listen carefully and remember.

Vermell Rhodes, from PS 46, played a game with "Mary had a Little Lamb" where a girl was Mary and another child was the lamb who followed her around the room wherever she went. The whole class eventually joined in.

Michelle's(from PS 36X) ghost game: with a Kleenex make a ghost and raise it and lower it. The children have to follow the direction of the ghost and make high or low ghost-like sounds.

Paul Madden and Lucian Ban at PS 150 are making the most of the alternate sounds onthe keyboards to create their own orchestra. Allowing the children to hear theother instrument sounds was very exciting for them. Some children were also inspired to practice more, knowing they would be playing in a group. The children seemed to better understand the importance of playing in an even tempo by being placed in an ensemble situation.

Vermell played another game where she hid an object somewhere in the room and one child at a time would try to find it. To help them, she would play high notes on the piano if they were close and lower notes the farther away they got. The children went wild over it!

James Ross at PS 163 has started working on fractions with his music classes. He draws a pizza-like circle, slicing into smaller and smaller pieces. Pat Little,in New Orleans, also made visual connections (on large charts) between note value relationships, fractions and sliced pies.

Vermell played a game with children walking around the room. When she plays high notes they have to stretch their arms to the sky and walk on their tip-toes. When she plays low notes, they have to squat down while walking. Another big hit!

A child at PS 46 identified the dots underneath the notes in Grasshopper as"avocado", almost like staccato.

At PS 36, classroom teachers came to help the intern when the music teacher wasn'tat school and were pleasantly surprised by how skilled their children are. Encourage classroom teachers to visit.

At PS 11, Sharon Golub had the children look up "flat" in the dictionary and put the definition on the word wall with the children's help.

Sharon reviews the previous day's lesson briefly before going on to each new lesson. It helps the children to make connections between pieces and remember new concepts.

Try lining up two systems of rhythm cards and have the children read from one system to the next without stopping to make the connection between the pianomusic and the cards.

After George Harrison's death, Sharon Golub at PS 11 had a lesson on the Beatles and their effect on music. At the end of class, the kids got to dance to "HereComes the Sun", one of George Harrison's hits. Ted Hearne, one of our interns, wrote, "Something about listening to Abby Road with 5-year-olds reminds me why I became a musician."

Once again, Happy Holidays! I look forward to hearing from all of you soon!