Strategy+11+-+Music

Strategy 11 - Music, Rhythm, Rhyme and Rap

What strategies in this chapter appealed to you? How can you envision applying this strategy in your classroom?

Carla: I feel like this is such a powerful strategy for students, but this is also definitely the strategy that pulls me out of my comfort zone the most. It's only in the past couple of years that I've begun using it much, because it is so uncomfortable for me to sing in front of my students. But the first year that I taught my students the "MMMR rap" about mean, median, mode and range, I heard kids singing it during the state test to help themselves remember the steps. I figure that if I can give them a tool that is powerful enough for them to choose to use it as a memory prompt during state testing, then I owe it to them to do so. One addition that we have lately gained is being able to use technology to "sing" for us - either songs on Discovery Education or School Tube, etc. When I start to teach a new unit, I often search it on School Tube now, and several times have found links to songs that help my students retain the topic's main ideas. I never knew how many topics had songs created by other teachers - what a nice way to not have to reinvent the wheel, when we can just use another teacher's creation! I loved the information in the chapter on p. 80 about playing music during a task that the students come to associate with a task - that's such a __ idea (whatever the name of that training is, the one that Bev Lund leads, that we took at ESSDACK, now I can't remember the name of it. It's the one that advises using movement and music to keep kids engaged and learning).

Hi everyone! I am finally getting around to adding to our discussion:) Today I taught my class to sing the Mean, Median, Mode song on page 84. (There are actually two versions of the song--I combined the parts I liked best from both.) My kids loved it!! Then, of course, we needed a song about Range, and that's on page 81. I thought we'd sing it every day this week. Can't wait to see if anyone starts singing during the Interim test!

Janice

Lynn I made up my own song for range, since Home on the Range was one of our songs in our music program this year:

Sang to Home on the Range tune.

Home Home on the Range, To Find the range, Just Subtract the least from the greatest. (replacing: where the deer and the antelope play)

This also ties in with humor since they all start giggling when I sing....