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Elementary Music
This project is finished. But read my responses to the questions of other users in the Recent topics area. I began teaching at a peculiar time in music education. Our California State Standards were on the eve of their adoption, but were not being publicized, heavily. I came out of a university where the national standards were addressed, not stressed but we did spend a considerable amount of time talking about them. Then, fortunately for me, the district I hired into had a coordinator that was a big supporter of the standards adoption. So, I have been immersed in the standards since I was a first year teacher. I have now been teaching for four years, and working with the standards vigorously for three years. My first year, I was just trying to survive. After my first year, I asked myself, what did my students walk away with this year? When I met with my new students that next year, I received my answer. Very little. I was not trained to be a classroom music teacher, just band, and maybe strings, if you had to. Yet after I started using the standards, I found that all the students were learning more and were more engaged. The concepts I thought they couldn’t handle weren’t as difficult as I thought. They were able to write simple melodies, sight sing rhythms, and even knew quite a bit of vocabulary. They were even better at singing on pitch. The students blew me away with what they could do. Even if they didn’t do music again, they walked away with an appreciation for music.
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