Cleaning Up the Covid Chaos

After a full school year teaching in a pandemic, I find myself looking around at all the aspects of my life now in disarray, wondering how I will ever pick up the pieces. Living through such stressful, constantly changing, and unforeseen circumstances forced me to narrow my focus, but now that the fog is clearing I'm realizing a big part of my recovery...

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We Did It.

Well, some way some how, we did it fellow music teachers. We survived a pandemic school year.Some of us spent the year teaching online, posting lessons, or in live video meetings. Some of us went traveling around the building on a cart, or transformed our music rooms and made individual music kits to keep social distancing. Some of us taught non-music...

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Favorite Ways to Teach Form

Musical form is one of those concepts that doesn't get as much attention as things like rhythm and pitch but is actually one of my favorite things to teach- there are so many fun ways to learn about form! Here are some of my favorite ways to teach form, no matter the specific grade level or the musical form they're learning. 1. Identify with movement When...

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Pandemic Teaching Finds I Plan On Keeping

As this school year comes to a close, there is a lot I absolutely cannot wait to walk away from and never have to do again. Concurrent online and in-person socially distant teaching, for example. Or taking all of my teaching materials home every day in case the school is online tomorrow. But there are also some things I've done for the first time this...

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May Highlights 2021

I'm actually surprised at how quickly May flew by this year considering how much more open my calendar was than a typical year, but here we are starting another month again! I still have several more weeks of school left because my district delayed the first day of school by a few weeks in the fall to give us more time to get ready, so we're still...

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