It is that time of year again—the dreaded Silly Season. I don’t mean to be a Christmas Grinch, but it does all seem to be crazy at this time of year.
For me professionally we are winding our year down with only a week and 3 school days with students left for this academic year. This means it is reporting time, clean up time and get resources for next year ready time. It seems to be busier now, at the end , than it is in the beginning of the year!
Like most teachers, this time of year is a hard one to keep students doing real and meaningful work when they know that we have finished assessing them for the year. It is at this time of year I like to do a few things that keeps the Principal, students and myself sane and happy.
I consider myself lucky to be a Music teacher, it isn’t as hard for me to keep the students going. My classes still enjoy doing practical lessons so we have been doing a lot of those. This can be a bit hectic though when you have 30 students in a class and they all want to play loudly at the same time! Recently I found on TPT a newcomer “Kelly’s Music Books” and simply loooove my first purchase!
The first book I bought for Guitar (pictured above) comes with MP3’s and comes in both TAB and standard notation. I have been trialling these with my Year 7 classes, and every child has had success playing along. It is easy to follow, easy to teach and most importantly the students are learning! I had one young man go home a create a variation on one of the riffs we had learnt in class, then as he was showing a friend in the class they started playing along together creating their own little ensemble and song—it was great to see. My only regret is that I didn’t have these earlier, but I will be using this product with all of my Year 7 classes next year.
The second thing I like to do with my classes at this time of year is to play games. My classes enjoy playing Bingo and love the sets I have created for use in class. Their favorite is the Music Symbol Bingo, but I still like to play the Treble Clef Bingo with them too—they don’t like it because they have to think a bit harder with this one! I have these bundled together and available at my store.
Link to Music Symbol Bingo here
Link to Treble Clef Bingo here
Link to the Bingo Bundle here.
The last thing I like to do with my classes is the listening tasks. Now that December is here I feel it is fair game to have Christmas Listening Tasks. The students moan at first, but soon get tapping along to the songs while we listen to them and answer questions. I have a couple of different Christmas themed listening questions in my Christmas Music Worksheets product.
Link to the Christmas Music Worksheets here.
Hoping you survive the Silly Season using a couple of these in your own teaching
Happy teaching
Julia from Jooya
Thanks for the shout out Julia! Keep rocking out with those kids. =)