Music does bring us joy.  We listen to it, sing it, perform it, stand in awe of it.  Whether we are musicians or not, there is a place in our hearts for music.  The holidays are no different.  I love using music in many ways during the holidays: as we decorate our tree I like to play my favorite Glenn Miller Christmas CD, In the Christmas Mood, as we tidy up the house the kids love some of those traditional Christmas sing-along songs.  In the classroom, I keep my Charlie Brown Christmas CD handy as it has beautiful, relaxing jazz piano music featuring the Vince Guaraldi trio and at home, late at night as I bake cookies or wrap presents, I turn to my favorite hard rock music to keep me going!

What is it about music?  It’s the creation of atmosphere, the expression of joy and the celebration of our culture.  What would this season be without it? Even if you can’t stand the music as a whole, there is usually that one song that just hits the spot. For me, it’s O Holy Night and the instrumental version of Sleigh Ride: two completely different feelings that come alive during the season. (To hear these and other great holiday songs, scroll to the end of this post.)

These are the things we should be sharing with our students and families.

As the last days before Christmas scurry by, I must remember that all these crazy things we do both in and out of school, are because we are expressing our joy and I need to pause and enjoy them.1

Enjoy your last day with your students (if you still have one) and the last hours before Christmas. Here is my little gift to you. Enjoy this short playlist of great holiday music to play in your classroom at certain times in your day. (Or at home just for you and your family!):

• As students are entering your room and getting settled
• As students are working on a holiday craft or art project
• At snack time
• As students are cleaning up the room
• As you sit quietly alone for that one precious moment before your day begins or when it has ended

Merry Christmas!  Happy Holidays! and Happy New Year!

~EMP

Related posts:

1. Holiday Joy in Arts
2. Beethoven’s Birthday – A December Holiday
3. Music in Foreign Language Instruction: Classroom Activities

Over the last weeks, I have received many emails, a few comments and some personal inquiries into active listening time. In nearly each post in this series I’ve highlighted how this time allows me to make connections between music and literacy every day with my students. Whether it be visualization and reading, listening for the BME Rule, or inspiration for a story or poem, actively listening to music is a powerful way to engage students in their understanding of both music and literacy!

So what is Active Listening?  It is the art of listening with your intellect and emotion; where you can block out distractions and just focus on the music, listening to the intricacies of the sounds coming from the speakers.  I tell my students it is when your brain is active.

How can you make time for active listening?  I listen to music each day with my students during our snack time and focus on one piece of music for an entire week.  These repetitive listenings allow us keep the time short and to focus on the music at hand as we become familiar with it.  If you don’t have your students every day, you may listen together for the first 5-10 minutes of class or use an entire class period to listen and respond as you would a story.  Another option is to collaborate with another teacher.  You may work with the music teacher in your school to do most of the active listening part and you can integrate those experiences into other content areas.

Active listening is a wonderful time for students to build community while they discuss their ideas and respond to music.  In addition, you can mold the time to fit your needs as a literacy teacher.  For more information  about Active Listening and how it can be used in your teaching, check out these resources:

• A few posts back I compared listening to music with how we read a book in The Connections Between Music and Reading as there are things you do before, during and after you read or listen.
• Whether you’re collaborating with the music teacher or creating the time for Active Listening experiences in your own classroom, this post Music Listening Experiences will provide you with guiding questions and ideas for interpretive reflection after you listen.
• This is the ultimate resource for integrating Active Listening experiences into your curriculum: Inspired by Listening is my teacher resource book that talks about it all.  It contains everything from introductory lessons about how to listen, questions to ask, activities to try, full lesson plans with reproducibles, complete project ideas and an entire section on background knowledge which includes composer biographies, information on musical genres and a listing of pieces you can introduce to your students.

And regarless of whether you use these experiences for integration with other content areas or not, allowing for active listening time with your students is an enjoyable activity that builds community in your classroom!

~EMP

Celebrate Music and Literacy by taking advantage of Elizabeth’s book Inspired by Listening, a teacher resource book that focuses on how to use listening experiences in your classroom to inspire all kinds of writing (including sentence and paragraph writing, poetry and narratives), reading strategies (including visualization and main idea) and even grammar practice; all while listening to music that you love.  The book is on sale this month only (March) at 20% off!

Related posts:

1. The Music-Literacy Connection
2. Collaboration in Action – Music Listening Experiences
3. Celebrate Music and Literacy – book sale!

If there is one thing my students learn before they leave me to move onto the next teacher, it’s the BME Rule.  I have a sign in my classroom that states: “The BME Rule – All Good Writing is Following It!”

It has to do with the fact that all good pieces of writing have a beginning, a middle and an end.  But in my class, students get this concept drilled into their heads as we listen to music each day during our Active Listening time.  When I talk about the BME Rule, I always mention music.  Like this:

“All good pieces of writing (and music!) follow the BME Rule!”

And it’s true!  Music is a composition that needs to be pleasing to the human ear, just as a story, an article or a poem needs to be as well.  Our brains love organization and even the most abstract piece of music will still have some B, M and E!

If you listen to any piece of music, you can find its beginning, middle and end.  Sometime the beginning may be short and the ending can be abrupt, but they are there just the same.  Paralleling the BME in music to the stories, reports and poems we write can be yet another effective way to show students an important aspect of good writing.

And you can take it further too.  Ask students what makes a good beginning, middle and end in a piece of music:

B – Does it grab the listener’s attention?  Does it introduce anything? (instruments/character, themes, forshadowing)

M – Does it have details?  (layers of sound) Does it tell a story? (with various themes or lyrics)

E -  Is it exciting/subdued/abrupt?  Why and what does that do for the listener?  Does the ending wrap things up?  How? Does it bring back a familiar theme (ABA form) or introduce something somewhat new (coda)?

Here are some songs you can use to illustrated musical BME in your teaching:

~EMP

Celebrate Music and Literacy by taking advantage of Elizabeth’s book Inspired by Listening, a teacher resource book for integrating musical listening experiences into the classroom.  The book is on sale this month only (March 2011) at 20% off!

Related posts:

1. The Connections Between Music and Reading
2. Visualization in Music and Writing
3. Visualization in Reading and Music

In my last post, I wrote about how visualization using music can help students build their visualization in reading.  In this post, I want to explore the possibilities of using musical visualization to prompt good writing.

Being able to allow students to imagine their story, repeat it in their minds, and “walk around” their visualization to clarify details is a step worth taking in a prewriting stage of composing a story on paper.  How many times have we asked students to add details to their stories or descriptions of what they are trying to convey?  Music can be a wonderful vehicle to get those juices flowing.

A couple of weeks ago, my students and I were listening to Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 No.7 A Major: a short, beautiful piece for which students have a variety of interpretations.  After listening a couple of times to the piece, I ask students to start visualizing the story in their  minds.  Just prompting them with this one suggestion is all they need to get a story going in their mind.  (Some don’t even realize they’ve been doing it until I point it out to them.)  Once they have started to talk about their stories, we discuss character, setting, sequence of events, conflict and resolution.

Each time we listen to the piece, I encourage the students to close their eyes or stare at a spot in the room so that they can focus on the visualization in their minds:  “Walk around the story in your head.  Look around.  Notice the details.  Where are you?  What is going on?  Who is there?  What are they doing?  How are they acting?”

This particular piece of music is perfect for this type of activity because you can play it many times in one sitting with your students since it is only 53 second long!

Sensory Imagery – With this type of visualization, it is the perfect opportunity to talk about the senses.  When students “throw themselves into the story” they are invited to use their senses to explore what is in their minds.  (This works well with artwork too!  Pick a piece of art and ask students to “throw themselves into the painting” and look around.)  After talking about their experiences, students are ready to put into words great descriptions on paper.

Writing Stories – Of course, a natural extension of asking students to come up with a story using music visualization is to have them write it out.  Usually I would ask students to plan their B, M and E (beginning, middle and end) with a graphic organizer.  With my class this year, however, I did something a little different.  I had students create stories in a poetic way using a Story Pyramid that was shared by @evab2001.   Here are examples of what my fourth graders came up with.  (Read it to yourself while playing the piece for the full effect. )

Pierre:

Sad, heartbroken

Rainy city; Nighttime

His girlfriend dumped him.

He got soaked by rain.

He stepped in a huge puddle.

He walked into his house very wet.

He will get an awesome, new girlfriend tomorrow.

Dog:

Friendly, cute

Deep, dark forrest

He is very lost.

He needs to find shelter.

He needs to live by himself.

He is finding an exit to home!

He found his loving owner all by himself.

Music inspires so many things!  This month, I hope it inspires you to bring new depth to your literacy programs!

~EMP

Celebrate Music and Literacy by taking advantage of Elizabeth’s book Inspired by Listening, a teacher resource book for integrating musical listening experiences into the classroom.  The book is on sale this month only (March 2011) at 20% off!

Related posts:

1. Visualization in Reading and Music
2. The Connections Between Music and Reading
3. Reinforce the Writing Process through Musical Creation

It has always fascinated me to think of all the connections music has with reading.  In fact, last year, I remember looking over my district’s literacy curriculum, thinking how nearly everything stated on those pages about reading and literacy could be paralleled to music study.

In my book, Inspired by Listening, I explore all the ways we can integrate music listening experiences into our teaching: sharing music with our students and then using those experiences to build community and inspire great writing.

So let’s consider music listening with reading. A while back, I wrote an article entitled “Listen Like you Read” and in it I explored the parallels of reading and active listening to music. For example, when someone reads, there are things they do before, during and after the experience. In fact when we teach reading, our lessons are structured around this format.

The same applies to listening to music. Before you listen, you must know some background about the genre, composer or piece. While you listen, you are concentrating on the experience by becoming familiar with the music as you listen to it many times. After you listen, you interpret what you have just experienced by making judgments about the music.

Knowing the background of the music we listen to can be beneficial. We can learn about the composer, the time in which he/she lived or the style of the piece. Learning about and playing some of the instruments that are used can also provide students with some good vocabulary to use later as well as using vocabulary words learned in music class.

As soon as we begin to read a story we are experiencing it. The same goes for listening. The more we listen to a piece of music, the more we remember main themes, hear the detailed layers of the instruments, anticipate familiar or favorite parts and even pick up on new surprises. Listening to good music has the same effect as reading a good story: we want to listen over and over to continue enjoying the experience.

After we have experienced a piece, we are open to interpretation. We think about and discuss what the piece means to us, making judgments about it, the instruments and even the composer. It is in this stage that integration takes place. Your objective for your students will determine what activity your students may do after they listen. You may want them to write, draw, create something, or practice their speaking skills. The sky is the limit.

So, how can this help our teaching of reading?  By making parallels between the two skills (listening and reading) students are able to understand a concept more deeply.  When I listen to music each day with my students, we take the time to really delve into a piece.  We discuss it, we listen and we discuss again.  What’s more, is that I verbalize the parallels between listening to music and reading a book or story.  I know that by making these connections, some kids seem to “get it” more.

Understanding how they (the students) listen to music is a step in the direction of understanding how they read.  And when those processes are brought to their attention, the students can practice them and get better at them.  For example, a student who listens to any popular music on the radio (especially one that seems to be repeated many times throughout the day) will  immediately think about the performer(s) as the first notes sound, enjoy the music as it plays and may even think about the song after it is done.  Even a quick, “I love that song,” counts as a reflection of one’s experience.

Music can be a motivating factor in how you get students to understand the process of reading.

For more information about how to bring musical listening experiences into your classroom, see Inspired by Listening.

~EMP

Image from http://www.krisbattles.com/Drawing.html

Related posts:

1. Linking Music to Reading
2. The Music-Literacy Connection
3. Collaboration in Action – Music Listening Experiences

Interested in integrating the arts into your teaching and unsure where to start?  Simple: Follow Your Passion, your interests, your own experiences and bring them to your students.

When I first started teaching, I started with my first love – music. Thinking that all students could listen in the classroom with little preparation, I decided to bring in some great music and listen to it with my students. We started with Mozart and other great composers, then we listened to American genres of music: blues, jazz, big band, rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop, even rap. Our times listening together created for some wonderful discussions, community building and every so often some in-depth integrated opportunities.

And the great things we did in class turned into the content of my book, Inspired by Listening. I still use these strategies in my classroom today and they are just as effective now as they were thirteen years ago.

I know a teacher who is very passionate about yoga. She brings to her teaching the art of breathing, integrating those strategies into transitioning, stress reduction and vocal projection and control.

Another teacher loves film making and uses his own passion and talent to create and produce stories on film to motivate his students to express their ideas and deepen their understanding of the curriculum.

A teacher-dancer uses movement to help students internalize everything from the definitions of adjectives to science processes such as the water cycle and photosynthesis.

When teachers give themselves permission to follow their hearts in their classrooms and share themselves with their students, a powerful connection is made between teacher and student.  A different type of community is built and your room becomes a place that is safe for learning.

So think about what it is that interests you in the arts.  Is it storytelling, visual art, music or drama?  Poetry, dance, design or movement?  There are so many forms of art from the traditional to the media-rich.  Finding the one that speaks to you is a great place to start.

After all, it is through us that students can be inspired, so we need to be inspired ourselves!

Click one of the tags from this post to find related posts.