Learning Centers in the Music Room - 3rd grade Recorders and Reading the Music Staff

Today I showed being a risk-taker and I tried learning centers for my 3rd grade recorder class. I am now a convert! They were a great way to get students actively involved in reviewing many different concepts in the same lesson. Learning centers require students to be communicators by showing cooperation with others. 

For my classes of 24 third graders I used six stations.

1) Note Speller

Students use mancala tiles on laminated five line staves to make words. First however, they start with the basic line 1, line 2, etc. and then they do the basic spaces. Thinking about it now, those should have been line E, line G, line B review cards! After reviewing the lines and spaces they start making the words. They use the answer key to help them spell the words. This could also be a partner activity where one person has the word and has to help the other person out the tile in the right place using just their words. 

2) Treble Clef Staff Races

One student as the "teacher" goes through one of four stacks of cards. There is a stack of line numbers, space numbers, line letters, and space letters. The teacher picks a stack and says the card. The other students rush to that spot on the staff. The teacher says switch and they go back to the start underneath the staff. Once the teacher is done with a stack, a new student becomes the teacher. Students start with the line and space number stacks. I have a poster with the names of the lines and spaces nearby for reference.

3) Recorder Memory

This memory game has three parts, the recorder fingering, the name of the note, and the location of the note on the staff. My students had a hard time with all three, so I simplified it to be just the name of the note and the fingering. Since this was our first time doing this, I gave them a reference sheet to check.

4) Treble Clef Flash Cards

Two sets of flashcards! Free download from Making Music Fun.

5) Drawing the Treble Clef

At this station students use a worksheet that I drew to practice writing the treble clef.

6) Recorder Practice

At this station, students practice playing their recorders with me!

Thanks to the fabulous Music with Mrs. Dennis blog for some of these ideas!

Academic Discourse in the Music Room - "Find Your Partner"

During the first year teacher induction program last year, my district gave me a little book they had put together called "Routines for Accountable Academic Discourse." All of these techniques are designed to increase student talk and decrease teacher talk. I used "Find Your Partner" to reinforce instrument names and sounds. 

I have found that, over the summer, students seem to forget the names of instruments. When the students turn in their forms after my traditional instrument demo day, I get forms back where students have written the name of one instrument, but they really meant another instrument. Or I get things like "clumpet." My goal when doing instrument demos this year was to add an activity that would reinforce instrument names and result in students asking for the instrument they meant to ask for.

"Find Your Partner" is an activity where the teacher prepares sets of things, such as the first and last halves of a sentence. The teacher passes these out and the students go to find their partner, the person who has the other part of their sentence. During this time of trying to find their partner, students use lots of academic language while talking with one another. This can also be done with categories of things, which is how I used it. 

To prepare, I made cards with an instrument's name, a picture of the instrument, a description of what it looked like, and a description of what it sounded like. 

Find Your Partner is easily differentiated! I gave my ELL and special needs students the easier cards that had either just the single word or the picture and I gave my better readers the cards that described the sound of the instrument. To ease reading anxiety, I read each card as I handed it out. 

This activity can be used to randomly group students or you can have preassigned groups that they discover after the activity. 

One could say that based on the pre-assessment of how the forms were filled out last year and the post-assessment of how they were filled out this year, this activity is successful! The number of correctly filled out forms increased dramatically. 

I will definitely use this Routine again because it was easy to implement and fun!