Teacher Tuesday: teaching letter names of notes on the staff (part 2)

If you missed last week's Teacher Tuesday post, I talked about my favorite full-class activities for teaching the letter names of notes on the staff in any clef. You can read that post here. Today, as promised, I'm back to talk about my favorite activities to teach letter names in small groups. I use these activities primarily in centers, where students...

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Mommy Monday:10 Foods for Busy Moms to Keep On Hand

I have very high standards when it comes to how low-maintenance a recipe must be for it to be added to my cooking repertoire. I use a menu planner to plan out my meals, and I always plan meals that I can have ready to serve within 15 minutes of getting home on week nights. On weekends and holidays? Maybe 30 minutes-worth of work. Max. But even then,...

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Teacher Tuesday: teaching letter names of notes on the staff (part 1)

Teaching students the letter names of notes on the staff is an important part of music literacy. I think of letter names and rhythm notation like multiplication facts and sight words for elementary homeroom teachers- they are fundamental skills that students need to practice over and over again. And, like learning times tables, it can be boring. Over...

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Mommy Monday: 3 ways IKEA Trones can be your home organization hero

So, a few months ago, I came across these little things called Trones at IKEA: They are plastic shoe storage cabinets and come in sets of 3, but they are each separate so you can arrange them vertically or horizontally to fit your space. OR so you can use just one at a time instead of all 3 together. Once I saw this thing I immediately thought...

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Teacher Tuesday: Color-Coding Revisited

Back in August I shared my new color-coding system for my classroom, and it turned out to be a popular topic. If you're new to these parts, you can catch up on the topic here: Today I want to give you an update on how the system has been working, and how I have expanded the system further since my last post on the topic. First of all, the duct...

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Mommy Monday: 3 steps for organizing new toys

Well, we've successfully survived the entire holiday season, and even made it through (for most of us) the first week back in school- for your kids and/or for you as a teacher! After that big push of madness fun, I'm now entering the hangover stage: you know, that moment when you look around at all the new presents that are sitting haphazardly...

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Teacher Tuesday: fresh start 2015 {freebie}

Raise your hand if you went back to work yesterday! Oh my, by half-way through the day I was completely exhausted. Getting back into the swing of things is rough. I have a freebie for you today that I hope will help with that- click on the picture to download for free! This is a checklist of things you can do to clean up, organize, purge, and...

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Mommy Monday: fresh start 2015 {freebie}

It's a new year- Happy 2015! For those of you who don't know, I spent most of my childhood in rural Japan, and New Year's is kindof a big deal in Japan. One of the things we do, called 大掃除, is like the American "spring cleaning"- the literal translation is "big cleanup". Everyone in the family helps clean the house from top to bottom. With small children,...

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Follower & Feedback Frenzy

Big news! Several of the up-and-coming music teacher sellers on TeachersPayTeachers have joined forces for an awesome giveaway! There are lots of ways you can enter my giveaway, and you can come back and do many of them once a day if you want more entries! And don't forget to follow the links to enter the giveaways in the other stores as well-...

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And the Award Goes To.....

Jennifer from The Yellow Brick Road and Michelle from Music With Miss W both recently nominated me and my blog for the Liebster award! I love both of their blogs, so I was thrilled to receive the mentions. The Liebster award is awarded by bloggers to blogs with growing audiences. At the end of this post, you'll find the bloggers that I've...

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