Ukulele- my new(ish) obsession!

I don't know about you, but I'm in love with the newest trend in general music education- ukulele! I've been playing for a bit more than a year, and I love how easy it is to pick up and play. My absolute favorite thing about Ukulele is that the kids are SINGING while they are playing. I love recorder, a lot, I'm a former instrumentalist and recorder makes me euphoric, but I was always bummed my kids weren't singing as much when we were working on fundamentals.  So it's amazing that my kids are successfully playing instruments and using their gorgeous singing voices.

I've figured out a few things in my first few failed attempts and now in my success of teaching the Ukulele. I'm planning on doing a whole post later on about what didn't work for me when I first started teaching Ukulele, so in this post, I'm going to share what has worked well for me. 

Rainbow Ukulele was a godsend for someone who felt like she was in over her head. I have experience teaching strings, so I wasn't too worried about some of the aspects that I've heard some teachers talk about, like tuning. I tune all of my beginning orchestral strings students sometimes alone  and it isn't that big of a deal for me. I was lucky to have a class set of Diamond Head Ukulele's donated by e.A.R.T.h. Awareness of Brevard, so I didn't even have to worry about how to pay for them. The Ukulele's I received do have the cheap nylon strings on them, but I tuned them everyday (with the help of a few gifted violin players) for a month and they finally started to normalize now I just do minor adjustments that don't take long at all. Also, I thankfully don't have perfect pitch so I cheated a bit and tuned the Ukulele's all up a full half step to help them stretch a bit more. It worked pretty well although one of my gifted violinists was frustrated a bit when I was doing it, she knew what I was calling A in class was not really A but none of the other kids knew or cared, and I really think it helped the stretching process... I digressed- my biggest concern when approaching this new adventure was having the students feel like they are making adequate progress while learning the basics. When I was looking for a method or a process, I came across Rainbow Ukulele on TpT, and I fell in love. In the past have done a differentiated instruction version of Recorder Karate I created and my students responded very well to that incentive system. My kids are crazy excited about earning beads for their Ukulele progress. I've read that some teachers hand them out as they go, but I had students lose some of the beads, and I can't afford to replace them constantly, so I came up with another way to track the students progress as we are working. Then when we are done playing Ukulele at the end of the year, we are going to have a necklace/bracelet/keychain making party.   

If you saw the pictures of my new classroom design you may have seen this one:

The picture above is a 'road map' of all of the Rainbow Ukulele songs. My students are going to get campers that will be color coded for each class to write their names on, and they will get to 'drive' their campers from one song to the next to show off their progress. In the past having a visual in my room of other students progress has really helped motivate some of my less intrinsically motivated students, it also helps foster a good class versus class competition dynamic since I will have the campers color coded. When I get the campers all cutout, and the magnets added next week, I'll update this post and add a picture of the campers on the map. 

Are you in love with Ukulele too? What's your favorite activity you've done so far? Feel free to share it below! 

Happy Valentine's Day!

I hope you have had a beautiful day. My day was lovely and full of music making. I've been working hard re-designing my classroom because when I came back in January, I realized I was totally over my nautical themed classroom. I get stressed out in the third nine weeks because we have a lot of music events that happen all at one in my county.  So to counteract my stress, I decided to re-design my room theme to kick my post-Christmas blues to the curb. For a reference point, this is what my classroom looked like last January:

I love the hand drawn chalk thing that has been going on in classrooms the last few years, and I also ADORE cute little woodland creatures and the idea of going on an adventure in music class, so I went with a camping theme. Also, I added in touches of chalkboard hand drawing for good measure because it makes me happy. Things I found on Pinterest inspired me, like schoolgirl styles camping classroom and I took those ideas and inspirational images and tried to make it my own. Feel free to check out my Pinterest board for my camping themed classroom to see other images that inspired me. My room isn't complete, but I'm overall very happy with the direction it is moving in. I hope you (possibly non-existent reader) enjoy the photos below. If you notice from the pictures below, there is a lot less on the walls as well as items physically in view in my room. I've been purposely trying to focus and pair down what I need in my room. I'm embracing minimalism both at home and at work. The students enjoy it too a few students mentioned they feel like they can focus better and said some other classrooms are too stimulating for them. I'm hoping to provide a space that makes them happy and comfortable as well as ready to participate, learn, and create together.

I will be posting my growth mindset Fox bulletin board in my TPT store soon, as well as my rules and other items I'm creating or have created for my new classroom design. Anyway, I hope you all had a lovely day, and your kids were well behaved. :)

S.Q.U.I.L.T.

This year my school's school improvement plan focus was on academic stamina. I was immediately in love with it, because I can work on that in my content area. It doesn't involve me sacrificing my subject to help teach fractions or reading strategies. Don't get me wrong fractions and reading strategies are essential; however, it's nice to be able to focus on what I love, music. So I got to work trying to figure out how to incorporate academic stamina in my classroom, and I decided that something I wanted to add to my classes is intentional, purposeful listening of remarkable examples of music. In my county, all of our fifth-grade students go to see the Brevard Symphony Orchestra perform. So, I decided to use the composers of the music my students would hear as the composers of the month, and I chose some of their most famous, sometimes most obscure, intriguing, and exciting works to share with my students. I used an acronym I heard many years ago, S.Q.U.I.L.T. {Super Quiet Uninterrupted Listening Time} to label our task of listening. I worked up a web of HOT {Higher Order Thinking} questions and set up how I would run my listening session.

 

You can view the posters at my TPT store here. I created and used my anchor charts of the elements of music to ground our discussion, and we began to listen. At first, we found the beat lightly tapping the beat on the back of our hands {Thank you Dr. Galt}, and then we moved forward discussing instrumentation then on to dynamics, tempo, texture and beyond. Most recently when listening to our composer of the month for January, I had a student say that John Williams' music could evoke a variety of feelings and that he felt both sad and happy at the same time listening to it. It was a beautiful moment in my room and listen to the students discuss that particular students analysis made me feel like such a proud Momma Bear. Having sixth grade in elementary school can seem like a blessing sometimes and a curse at others but at that moment I was so thankful. I felt privileged to have helped guide that student discover something so eloquent. I feel like this whole academic stamina focus has helped me fully understand the old, 'Sage on the Stage' vs. the 'Guide on the Side' educational idea. I did my Master's Degree at the University of Florida, and one of my favorite classes was with Dr. Charles Hoffer. It was thrilling and frightening, three hours a day, five days a week for three weeks his Socratic method would make you question just about anything, and he frequently talked about the Sage on the Stage' vs. the 'Guide on the Side.'

   

You can view this posters at my TPT store here. Overall I'm very happy with my students progress towards academic stamina throughout this year and I look forward to continuing S.Q.U.I.L.T. for years to come. If you had to focus on increasing your student's stamina, what would you do?

new adventure

Hi, my name is Kimberly Haggard, and I am not the best teacher ever. I feel and understand the exhaustion of doing the overwhelming job of teaching, on a day to day basis. My house chores mount when I'm busy, and my husband and daughter begin to feel neglected. How long can one simply keep powering through when you lose your why? What is why you may ask? It is your purpose. What is your purpose for teaching, why is what you do important, how can you make the world a better place? I thankfully have found mine again over the last year or so, but man, it is tough to lose your why. There are days I wake up and just want to stay in bed and not go to work. There are days when I can't go to sleep because the massive to-do list that is my life won't keep playing on auto pilot in my head. Occasionally when I get overwhelmed, I shut down and quit talking to people and become extremely unorganized and forgetful. I've tried a few times to start a blog over the last few years, and I've always stumbled and eventually abandoned it. Frankly, it's a bit daunting, exposing yourself to the great wide yonder-- and not knowing if anyone even cares or is interested in what you have to say. So I've decided if I am going to do this, I'm doing it for me, and the people like me. The blogs of people who have it all figured out and had gorgeous classrooms, and amazingly thoroughly planned lessons are inspiring. However being human I find myself a bit sad too when seeing and reading about it, and wonder why I can't seem to get this all figured out yet. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying I'm a blight on the educational system. I'm a teacher who consistently high scores on my evaluations, I love my students and I think most of them enjoy my class, and a few years ago my colleagues even saw fit to choose me as the teacher of the year for my school. Additionally and personally, I'm more than a bit snarky; I take things personally, and I talk too much. I'm sharing all of this to explain the transformation I've made over the last year or so. I have embraced minimalism.

Minimalism to some people is a terrible word, and it means things like boring, ugly, drab, unexciting, bland, etc. For me, minimalism is pure bliss. I have adopted it from my wardrobe to my home and now into my classroom. I adore minimalism. Minimalism is giving me the space to live the life I want to live. To transfer the concept to my music life, minimalism is giving me the space to eliminate the cutesy, redundancy, poor quality material and focus on high-quality folk literature and student engagement. Personally, I'm working on being the best person and teacher I can be. I can be jealous, quick to anger and slow to forgive. I've been working on making the most of my time with my students and not letting misbehavior and paper work take the joy out of my job. In this blog, I hope to share my new philosophy, ideas, and goals, for home, work and life, as well as funny things that happen in my classroom. If you are interested hop on over to my Teachers Pay Teachers store, The Minimalist Music Teacher- Kimberly Haggard, and check out my rebranding and some fun products. I hope to be adding more items soon. Thanks for reading!