Week 10 Student Teaching

This was my first week at my second placement. Now, I'm in a 4th and 5th-grade school. The environment of this school is much different than my first placement. I have actually worked at this school before as a teacher's aid for about 6 weeks. So I've met a lot of the staff and the principal before. The town that the school is in the town I grew up in.
The first thing I noticed when observing the music classes was how much different the content students are learning and how the class was managed. Every class is 30 minutes and there are tons of activities crammed into those 30 minutes. In my first placement is was very laid back and the classes were very long. The music teacher teaches the entire school. So, she has over 400 students a week. It makes for a very busy week. This first week here I've basically been observing. I found some great tips/materials from the first week. The teacher has this book called "Game Plan" and its a bunch of music lessons that tie into social-emotional learning, history,  national music standards, and movement activities. The instrument all the students are learning is the recorder. She gave me a recorder and I have been learning all the songs with the class. The first week I taught I think 5 of her lessons. It was a lot of fun. But by far the most beneficial thing I am getting from this placement is the beginner band. In my other placement I got no experience teaching band. This one I get tons. They have band during the day and after school. I stay after school to get extra experience.  Every day there is a different "sectional" of instruments who come into class and work on a piece of music. They have and extra clarinet, trumpet, and trombone I get to use every day. Super awesome and fun experience learning new instruments and helping students. I brought my flute in also and have been practicing along with the students as well.
Schmidt Chapter 11 

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Comments

  1. TrollgeekOctober 31, 2019 at 10:41 AM

    Wow! having 400 students a week is going to be pretty challenging, especially with 30-min periods that are full of activities. It's a good thing you love music and that you are getting experience in learning new instruments and getting to direct band. I'm curious about how you assess so many students. How do you determine grades, or don't you?

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    1. Robert YoungNovember 5, 2019 at 11:59 AM

      So, a lot of it is participation and performance based. The students all have Ipads that they record videos on of them performing in pairs and post it to this app called seesaw.. So, I have to listen to the same song like 100 times (because 4th and 5th grade have different songs) but the songs are usually about 20 seconds long so its not that bad. Maybe every other week there is a written assignment that is posted onto to the app as well. Everything else is student participation. The teacher helps with grading when she can so that helps a lot.

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