The Vocal Squiggle

Using art to create music, a piece of yarn a story and lots of imagination.

New Multimedia Standards in Massachusetts

A few ideas to dive into the 2019 arts standards in Massachusetts with a focus on multimedia and music.

Kindergartner’s Sing & Play

Kindergarten is a time where students are deeply immersed in early reading and decoding strategies. This can be supported by reading and writing music. Students in Kindergarten place quarter notes above the words of a song. There is no staff on the paper, just empty space above the lyrics. This gets them used to reading …

Color Coding Beginning Recorder

One of the first opportunities for students to experience reading standard music notation consistently is on the recorder.  As I introduce it every year, I am trying to brainstorm ways to change large learning leaps into structured and scaffolded steps to access standard notation. One way I have attempted to bridge the leap from iconic …

Beginning Uke

Open tuning on the ukulele to work with younger kids is an approach to the instrument that has gained tremendous popularity in recent years.  This approach is a way to get young kids to play familiar songs on the instrument in the first lesson.  This method has a natural driving force because it supports quick …

Call & Answer Composing

Creating music in the classroom is an important part of music. Anyway students can independently work through creating music in different ways.  Iconic, standard, solfege, recording, are all fantastic ways to get students involved in the creating music. Second Graders started the year by creating call and answer musical ideas with solfege.   Students practiced …

It’s Raining Forest.

Our last day up in the Alaska before our cruse was spent in Anchorage exploring the Chugach National Forest.  This is the most northern rainforest in the United States. We did a nice 4 mile stroll in the rainforest on a trail called Upper Wine Creek, sorry no wine but a fun little hike.  You …

Wrangell St. Elias, what big land you have!

Wrangell St. Elias, the largest of the National Parks.  The picture above shows the vast acreage of this park.  We only began to see this park. We headed down from Fairbanks with a 9 hour drive.  We stopped to smell the flowers and view the glaciers and mountains on our way down.  It was a …

Fairbanks, Land of the Midnight Sun.

We made it to Fairbanks!   I start off with this first picture, not because it's a great picture but to show everyone what was so crazy for me to experience.  Yes, it really does stay light out late at night.  This photos was taken at 10:40pm.  This was the hardest adjustment for us.  We would …

It’s Denali, it’s Delightful.

It’s Denali Day. Up at 5:00am to be at our tour departure at 6:00am. We chose the Denali Backcountry tour that was 14 hours long and headed all the way back to mile 90 of the road into Denali. You don’t have to take a tour but you do have a take a bus. We …