As a music teacher in a low-income school, I strive to teach my students in a culturally competent and relevant way. My school ensures our community that each student is receiving a high-quality education. I see every student in the building every week.
Every single one of my students deserves to have the materials to continue to learn music.
I focus on designing lessons that are fun and want to continue having fun with my students during this pandemic.
My Project
As a district, we are going to be sending home learning kits to our students, and my principal thought it would be awesome if we could also send home a recorder with our students in 3rd-5th grade so they don't miss out on playing a musical instrument which a lot of students look forward to.
As a general rule, students in 3rd grade in my district learn the recorder, however, since my school hasn't had music back in their curriculum for very long that isn't the case.
When COVID hit in the spring and forced our schools to close I was just starting to end recorder with my 3rd graders. I was then going to use the class set that I have with my 5th graders who had been working on learning note names and values for the remainder of the year. This year I would have been using them with the new 3rd and 5th-grade classes so every student since I started teaching at my school would have had recorder experience before moving into middle school.
Learning the recorder (as terrible as it may sound sometimes) is an essential part of the elementary music curriculum as it teaches the students that if you practice something you improve at it. It also awakes the desire to play other instruments in a formal band setting.
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