Author: Tammy Axt

Throughout my teaching career, there have been many days where I have been overwhelmed by the tasks and expectations I place on myself as an educator. If that is you today, stop what you are doing and go make a sunshine call to one of the parents in your class. Delivering positive news will brighten not only the parent’s day, but your day as well. The parent is usually so thankful that you took time out of your day to speak with them about how awesome their child is or about something amazing that they did this week. I recommend it over simply writing a note as you feel the positive energy over the phone, and the pleasant interaction stays with you.

I am fortunate that I teach about 450 students, so there is always something positive going on throughout the week. I have made many different calls this year for many reasons. However, the most memorable call of the year was to a family with a child for whom they don’t receive these types of calls often. The student was negatively approached by another child and maintained their composure and calm throughout the interaction. This was a very big deal for this child, who has been working on their explosive responses to others. When I called to tell the parent about how well her child maintained their composure, the parent was almost in tears and so thankful that I called with positive news. The parent repeatedly thanked me, and we have had an excellent relationship every since.

Parents are sometimes surprised by sunshine calls, as they are not used to positive news coming from the school. I tried to call a parent whose second language was English and left a message on their answering machine. The parent was alarmed that the school had called them, and it took some time to explain that I was calling to tell her how hard her child was working to catch up to the other grade five students, as they were new to the country. Once she understood, she too was very thankful and appreciative.

Parents are so busy and deal with so many stresses outside of the day. It’s very impactful for them to receive good news about their children, so it’s worth taking the time to be that person for someone’s family.

 

Without a doubt, the highlight for this term’s drama classes in the primary grades has been the creation of puppet theatres. We have taken pizza boxes and stick puppets and acted out some familiar stories. The grade two students are currently working on completing their performance of “Where the Wild Things Are”.

Leading up to our performances, we have spent half of each period exploring the story with our bodies, dialogue or reflections, and the other half has been spent preparing our puppet theatres. To prepare the students to really analyze the character’s feelings and thoughts, I have been reading a small part of the book every class and asking students to act out or respond to some part of the story.

A few examples of this are:

When Max’s room turns into a jungle I had students write in first person how Max is feeling.

When Max gets on the boat and travels for several days, I had the students act it out while I narrated the story. At one particular point, I asked the students to freeze and I went around the room interviewing a variety of students about how they are feeling. They were encouraged to speak in first person.

 

In the part of the story where the wild rumpus begins, I had the students act this out in slow motion focusing solely on their body and facial expression.

The rest of the period was spent creating the theatres. We spent time talking about and imagining what would go in Max’s room and all the other locations in the story. I prepared papers that fit inside the pizza boxes, and students coloured and prepared the backgrounds.

This was my first time doing this kind of assignment in drama with primary students and I have learned many things:

1. Pick a book where there is very little text. You want the students to be adding to the story, not only telling the story as it is. For example, when Max arrives on the island of the Wild Things, there is very little explanation in the story about how the Wild Things feel. We explored the feelings and thoughts of these characters.

2. Create a class set of puppet theatres that everyone uses. Students are able to work on their performance with a variety of people and can play all of the different roles when they don’t have ownership over one theatre. I also use the theatres for all my classes so we created and build them as a large team.

 

3. Have a narrator with a small amount of assigned lines to help the students stay on track. It is difficult for students in grade one or two to remember every part of a story. Using prompts allows students to remember the part of the story that they are at, and focus on adding their original dialogue to the presentation.

4. Have students give feedback to each other according to the criteria. We listened to each others’ performances and gave feedback. We stapled the feedback to the back of the narrator’s lines so that we could review it before every performance.

 

 

I am very excited about Canada celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary this year! There are so many fun activities and a feeling of celebration everywhere you go in our amazing country.

To gear up to a big celebration in June, we have been doing small activities every month as a school to get pumped up.

Last week in our assembly, I made up a 150 second challenge that my whole school participated in together. I put a large 150 second countdown timer on the wall and then took students on a tour across the whole country, through our actions and imaginations, before the 150 seconds were finished.

Below are the actions and activities that we did to start to celebrate our amazing country!

1. Go skating on the Rideau canal in Ottawa
2. Go skiing in Whistler BC.
3. Climb a mountain in Banff national park in Alberta
4. Go fishing in Northern Saskatchewan
5. Shovel your driveway in Winnipeg, Manitoba
6. Paddle your canoe in Algonquin Park in Ontario
7. Eat some poutine in Quebec
8. Go dog sledding in the Northwest Territories
9. Watch the Northern Lights in the Yukon
10. Ride a snowmobile in Nunavut
11. Dance an Acadian jig in New Brunswick
12. Wave to my family in PEI
13. Catch a lobster in Nova Scotia
14. Go whale watching in Newfoundland
15. Roll up the rim in Ottawa

 

 

Getting students going on the Creative Process can take some thoughtful planning on the part of the teacher. Students are sometimes stuck for ideas and need someone to provide them with a catalyst for inspiration. The chart above is directly from the Ontario Curriculum for the Arts, and gives some great ideas for how to challenge and inspire student creations.

Recently, in my grade 3 and 4 art classes, I decided that I was going to try a new idea for inspiring creations and see how students responded to a new type of stimulus. I gave them some quotes about inclusion and equity to choose from, and their job was to create an art piece that represented what the quote meant to them. The tricky part was getting them going on their pieces and providing them with support and an environment that would produce the artwork that I knew that they were capable of.

Using the above chart as a guide, I followed the suggestions when trying to inspire my students creations:

Introduce the initial idea, challenge, stimulus, inspiration and experience

Introducing this art piece to my students was tricky. They really needed to get their brains turned onto the issues of equity and inclusion before we tried to analyze our quotes or come up with imagery for our art pieces. I started by reading them the story of Viola Desmond from the book “Viola Desmond Won’t Be Budged”. (The book is very easy to understand for all students, and Viola’s sister was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, so the students had some familiarity with the story). This got the students thinking about racial segregation and asking thoughtful questions about Viola’s experiences. I introduced the quotes to them and encouraged questions or collaboration with others to reflect on the meaning of the quote that they chose. I even had some students bring in their own quotes. I gave them a graphic organizer with some questions on it to help to get them started reflecting on their pieces. The completion of a graphic organizer also allowed me a chance to see who needed additional inspiration or support before they started their art.

Provide models, examples and learning goals

As a class, we looked at the Peel District School Board art display for Black History Month on Twitter where many other students had used a variety of images to convey messages. We analyzed what we thought made particular pieces powerful and artistically appealing.

Establishes expectations, defines parameters and help develop criteria for success

Before we started our pieces, we talked through our criteria for successful completion of the art project. The students and I used Anne Davies process for co-creating a success criteria which can be found in the book “Setting and Using Criteria”.

 

The graphic organizer that I gave to students included the following questions:

My quote is:

 

In my own words, this means:

 

The symbols or images that this quote makes me think of are:

 

 

 

 

The mood I want to create in my art is:

 

 

The colours I will use are:

 

 

The focus of my piece (where I want people to look) is:

 

 

Some examples of the art with the quote that the students chose.

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela

 

 

My arts space is all about sharing who you are, what you think and what you like. I have a standing invitation to any student in all of my classes to share a song, poem, instrument, story or dance that they have learned in their home or community. In the last couple of weeks I have had one of my new students from Spain teach us a hip-shaking Spanish dance, another student teach us a song in Punjabi, and another student demonstrate the beginning of a Bollywood song on a xylophone. It is a great way to start a class and a great way to encourage others in the class to be the teacher. It also helps build our community as a group of artistic collaborators. As the students share over the year, I bring in a song that my dad wrote when I was a kid and share some of my own culture as well. I come from an East Coast family where humour is an important part of the arts.

Yesterday in class, a student came in and told me that she had been practicing a song at home and wanted to share it with the class. She played the song and the students in the class quickly realized that it was a song they recognized. One student gleefully said “This is the apple pen song.” I had no idea what they were talking about but quickly realized that every student in this grade 3/4 split class knew exactly what the apple pen YouTube phenomenon was all about.  They all had seen the video and loved the silly song. Using their excitement to enhance music class, we wrote songs using the rhythm of the song as our inspiration.  They quickly worked on their own lyrics and wrote a melody that they could play on the recorder. They were creating with happiness and energy and in 30 minutes everyone had created their own lyrics and melody to the song.

It was a great lesson in getting to know my students and using their interests as an inspiration for their creations.

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Creating our very own version of the “Apple Pen” song:

 

When grade one students start in my music class, we spend a lot of time engaging with and having fun interacting with music. We sing songs, play games and chant a lot of poems and stories. This action helps the students solidify the feeling of concepts such as beat or rhythm in their bodies and minds before we try and analyze it with proper notation. I use colour cards and we make up rhythms to colours such as blue, blue, purple, green. We have also created chants connected to holidays such as Santa, sleigh, reindeer, reindeer. Below is a lesson that I wrote to help my students create rhythms around Easter time last year. However, this lesson can be substituted with any time of the year, using any group of words that have one and two syllables such as sports, food, school subjects etc. 

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Title:  Bunnies and Eggs

Grade 1, Music

Time: 1-2 classes

Critical Learning
1. Two eighth notes (words with two syllables) are played more quickly than one quarter note (words with one syllable).

2. Two eighth notes and one quarter note each take up one beat. How many claps do we need with the word “bunny,” “egg,” etc.?

3. Which claps go faster, bunny or egg?

Curriculum Expectations
C1.  Creating and Performing: apply the creative process to create and perform music for a variety of purposes, using the elements and techniques of music.

C1.1 sing songs in unison and play simple accompaniments for music from a wide variety of diverse cultures, styles, and historical periods

C1.2 apply the elements of music when singing, playing, and moving

C1.3 create compositions for a specific purpose and a familiar audience

Learning Goals
At the end of this lesson, I can:

1. Rearrange words that represent quarter and eighth notes
2. Perform a 4 beat rhythm two times in a rondo form

Prior Knowledge and Skills

Keeping the beat to a variety of songs, poems and chants

Terminology

Ti-ti

Ta

Beat

Rhythm

Materials

Music K-8 Vol.17 no. 4 “Shaky, Shaky Egg”

Shakers

Minds On  

Show the students the foam bunny and egg and ask them what they think we will be singing about today?

Action! 

1.    Teach the students the song “Shaky, Shaky Egg.”

2.     As a class, put four foam bunnies and eggs on a music stand and ask the students to figure out how many shakes they need to match the words bunny and egg.  After students have discovered that you need one shake for egg and two for bunny, create a variety of ostinatos(repeated rhythms)  and practice them with the class.

3.    Put students into groups of four and give them four foam shapes ( a variety of eggs and bunnies). Assign each group a letter starting with B, C, D etc. Have each group practice shaking their rhythms with their shakers.

4.    In their groups students will make their own rhythm pattern and practice it.

Consolidation

Have the whole class perform a rondo with the song “Shaky, Shaky Egg” as the A part and each students rhythm as the B, C, D etc… part. The order of the performance will go A, B, A, C, A, D, A, E, A, F, etc.

Assessment

Assess students accuracy in playing their rhythm and ability to stay with the beat of the song

Differentiation (DI):

For students struggling, have them recite the words only for the rondo

To extend the activity, have students perform their rhythm with no words and using body percussion

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Here are some pictures of materials that I use in my class to teach rhythm to my grade 1 students:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes getting our older students to dance with each other is a challenge. Being touched or touching others can be so uncomfortable for them. I know exactly how they feel. I was one of the first members of my class in grade four to hit puberty with the force of a train. I remember what it was like to be so uncomfortable with anyone in my personal space or to have anyone look, comment or touch my body in any way . As a result, I really empathize with my students when they are shy or uncomfortable about personal space. One idea my teacher partner and I came up with to help with this issue was to create a dance unit that required students to dance with props instead of each other. Below I have outlined the student and teacher instructions of our unit.

Grade Five Spatial Relationship Dance

Student Instructions

Learning Goals

1. Demonstrate the use of five different spatial relationships with a prop.
2. Demonstrate the form ‘Call and Response’

 Spatial Relationships

Over/Under

Around

In-front/Behind

On/Off

Beside

Through

In/Out

Call

PARTNER 1 – performs a 4 or 8 count movement with a prop that demonstrates the use of a spatial relationship such as ‘over’. Partner 2 remains still while Partner 1 performs.

Response

PARTNER 2 – Then Partner 2 performs a 4 or 8 count movement with a prop that demonstrates the use of the same spatial relationship (such as over) as their partner but the movement must be different.

This call and response pattern is repeated five times.

Dance Plan Example:

 

Spatial Relationship	Partner 1	Partner 2
1. Over/Under	Jump and Spin	Twist and Gallop

 

Criteria

• Dance with a prop using 5 different spatial relationships
• Use the form ‘Call & Response’
• Create movement that uses your whole body
• Use both locomotor and non-locomotor movements

 

Next Steps: Show a preliminary performance to the teacher to get some next steps to help in the creative process

 

Student Reflection – Identify the two sections of the dance that you liked the best. Explain why these were your favourite.

 

Teacher Instructions:

1. Explain to students that spatial relationships have to do with how we relate to an object or person in space. Prepositions are used to describe spatial relationships. (Provide a list of prepositions.)
2. Introduce the concept of spatial relationships in any of the following ways: using a prop, using your own body, or using a partner.
3. Introduce the criteria for this dance emphasizing that the spatial relationships will be done with a prop.
4. Explain that the form ‘Call and Response’ is used when you see a dance battle. This dance will use the same form but is not meant to be a ‘battle’. Each partner will create their own movement.
5. Provide a variety of props for students to use to stimulate creativity.
6. When students begin to create their dances, watch to see if they are following the criteria listed on the student handout sheet.

Here is a picture that includes some of the props we used for our unit.