GStephens

Part Three is basically a breakdown of how Bluestine teaches his elementary students.  He gives the objectives for second through fifth grades and then shows how he develops each unit.  This is a great resource to have!  I hope to try some of these lessons when I finish the musicals.  I wish I could watch him teach, but at least I have the process.

In chapter fourteen, he discusses the techniques for teaching patterns.  While he says that each teacher should develop his/her own techniques, he describes some techniques that work for him.  He gives a list of "do's and don't's" which are helpful in planning what to do and how long each part of the lesson should be.  He even shows how he documents each student's progress.  This is very helpful because it gives me a starting place to try this system of teaching music. 

This has been an interesting and thought-provoking book.  It's made me realize I need to do more tonal work with my students.  As I work with next year's crop of kindergarteners, my hope is to implement some of these objectives into my lessons.  It seems it will be tough at first, but I'm glad to get some new ideas.  It's so easy to burn-out in teaching.  Refreshing the planning and lessons will help me renew my enthusiasm and energy for teaching.

One of the frustrations I've felt with my own teaching at East Central is that I've not had enough early elementary formal training in my background.  A lot of what I've been teaching has come from the way I learned music as a piano student with my mom and from the band director who continued my music instruction from fifth grade through high school.  It has been a constant challenge for me to learn how to teach the early grades--especially kindergarten and the first semester first grader.  I've not felt I had enough "prep" lessons for students to develop music skills until they were ready for more formal instruction.  For example, I know kindergarteners need to move a LOT, but I have not had enough movement activities in my bag of lessons that would use movement to teach music skills.

Part two of this book begins with an introduction to the seven stages of Preparatory Audiation:  1.  Absorption; 2.  Random Response; 3.  Purposeful Response; 4.  Shedding Egocentricity; 5.  Breaking the Code; 6.  Introspection; 7.  Coordination.  Rather than discuss each one, I would rather focus on my weakness--how he begins with kindergarteners.

I was surprised to read that Bluestine doesn't sing songs with words in his kindergarten classes!  Rather, he uses listening with movement and chant without words to begin developing his students who he says are in the tonal babble stage.  I plan to order two items he recommends:  One is a collection of recorded music compiled by Gordon, Jump Right In to Listening.  The other is a book:  The Early ChildhoodMusic Curriculum:  Experimental Songs and Chants.  I have a lot of thinking to do about teaching kindergarten in this manner--I can just imagine Dr. Ware or Mrs. Wood coming to do my observations with our East Central students dancing and chanting around like a bunch of wild things!  Perhaps it's just what I've been looking for--time will tell!

When I went to Savannah for the annual GMEA conference, I found this book, The Ways Children Learn Music, by Eric Bluestine.  I thought it looked interesting and decided to buy it and read it.  It has definitely made me rethink my own teaching of music at East Central!

In Part One, Bluestine begins by stating a well-known frustration among music teachers.  He says, "I want school board officials, parents, music teachers, and administrators to learn:  Music class is not simply a stop-gap during the school day during which students can relax between the 'important' subjects; music is more than simply a source of entertainment, more than a means of raising the self-esteem of a relatively small segment of the student population.  Music is a discipline as well as an art.  And, like other disciplines, it's worthy of study for its own sake."  When I read that, he had my attention!!

Mr. Bluestine presents a theory for teaching music that I had never heard.  I have relatively little background in elementary music methodogy, so his ideas were new ones for me to consider.  He states three goals all music teachers should keep in mind as they develop a music curriculum:  1) Our ultimate goal is to teach children to become independent musicians and independent musical thinker.  2) Children must develop two basic skills that will serve as readiness for all future music learning:  the ability to audiate and the ability to perform.  3) It's morally reprehensible for us to teach on the "most talented" students.  I agree with all three of these goals.  He mentioned two music aptitude tests I'd like to get and use at East Central:  Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (IMMA) and the Musical Aptitude Profile (MAP).  I hope to find these and start using them.

The main idea that has caused me to reconsider how I'm teaching music at East Central come from Lowell Mason, the Father of Music Education in America:  Teach sound before sign.  I've always introduced the quarter note and rest in kindergarten--maybe I should wait until later.  I realized in reading this book that I need to do more with modalities--major and minor, and that I should be introducing students to sound earlier on.  I suspect this book will change some of my approach to teaching music.

Today, in one of my first grade classes, I tried one of the ideas I got from Bluestine:  I tried teaching them about macro beats and micro beats.  They were able to clap both the macro beats of our keyboard song and the micro beats as well.  We even divided into groups with both happening at the same time!  I was encouraged!  I plan to delve more into these ideas and begin slowly changing my teaching and philosophy of music as I go.  This is indeed an interesting book!