First day back…

Today I taught at Pelican PS. We have a new music timetable which sees me teaching all the older classes on Wednesdays, and the younger classes on Fridays. After finishing last term on a bit of a high, feeling very at home in this school, and excited about my plans for the students, today felt surprisingly heavy and tiring. I suppose I am feeling pretty heavy and tired at the moment (the intensity of the conference, the rush back, the immediate transition into the new teaching term, nearing the end of my thesis edits… all taking their toll).

The first class I took today was one that had been quite unsettled for most of term 2. They were easily distracted, hard to keep on task, took ages to settle every time we stopped one activity in order to transition to another… At the end of last term, we had a composed a rather edgy little melody on xylophones, created a more soothing countermelody for the metalaphones, and had a ripping guiro riff, and a punctuating drum part as well. We’d worked with rhythms drawn from the rhyme Solomon Grundy, and though it sometimes felt like lifting weights for me (to keep them focused and working together), we had started to combine all these layers to make quite a satisfying piece.

I started the lesson today by asking them what they remembered us doing in our last lesson last term. (This was a bit of a ruse – in fact I hadn’t taken very detailed notes!) Well! I was surprised by how engaged they were by this question. Different children remembered different things (including some work we did with the egg shakers and metronome that I had totally forgotten about), and as they refreshed my memory, I began to ask more targeted questions, and their hands kept shooting up in the air to answer.

So that was a good beginning. We started our work by recalling the melody played by the xylophones. I got them to ‘play’ it on their bodies, assigning different pitches to different points on the body, from low to high. Together we figured out how to play the melody, showing these intervals. (This is a tactic I’ve developed as a preliminary step to working on tuned percussion, to get them to start preparing for the intervallic leaps).

Then we moved onto instruments. I accompanied on guitar. It sounded really, really good! Their teacher was beaming as they left the class. I think he felt really happy for his students – they are considered one of the trickier classes in the school, and perhaps don’t have lots of experiences of success. But they were a big success in my class today.

Next I want us to develop some song lyrics. I think the music that we have is going to be an introduction and/or bridge in a larger song. I’m not sure what the song will be about. But I have devised a plan for getting us started on the words. I had initially thought I might ask them how the music we have composed makes them feel. (As I said, to me it sounds kind of edgy). However, I don’t think children from ESL backgrounds can always articulate their sense of how music makes them feel, very easily. So I have decided I will bring a set of large-scale ‘emotions’ cards with me to the next lesson. I can borrow these from the University library. They depict primary age children showing all sorts of different emotions. I thought I might get each child in the class to choose which card they think is most appropriate for this music, we will gradually eliminate cards until we have narrowed down the options to a single emotional ’set’. Then we will decide on a scenario or detail to describe in our song, and hopefully the words will generate freely after that.

I think it may prove a more effective way of linking emotional responses (and depiction of emotions) in music. The ‘emotions’ cards are from Lakeshore Educational materials. The set they have in the library is an old one I think, but judging from this website, there are many such sets still available.

End of term round-up

I did my last teaching day for the term today. It was a corker. The last class – preps – were kind of all over the place. Last week I’d noted that I should give them more variety, hand out more instruments…. but I would say that the bigger range of instruments led to way more distraction, because they all wanted to change, and try everything. And they are not a very discipline class overall. Very excitable. Next time I’ll go back to just 2 or 3 different instrument groups.

I’ve been doing lots of ‘Conducting’ with the early years groups. I teach them hand signals for ‘pick up’, ‘play’, ’stop’, and ‘put down’. Anyone who misses a cue, or plays at the wrong time has to give me their instrument and sit out. Different children get to try conducting. It teaches them to keep their eye on me, and to stop playing on cue.

It’s been quite a hit (though I think I am exhausting its novelty now). They watch incredibly carefully, especially as sometimes I try and ‘trick’ them…. they take great delight in being absolutely accurate.

The other thing I’ve been doing with the lower years is metronome work, where we set the metronome ticking and try and play in time with it. They also get an incredibly strong focus with this.

That’s at Pelican Primary School. At Language School, we finished the term with a performance last week for Refugee Week, and an end-of-term concert for the parents and other classes. Here’s what we did:

Lower Primary

We finished composing our song Many, many butterflies, inspired by their visit to the Butterfly House at Melbourne Zoo, and in part a strategy to encourage them to ‘play like butterflies’ on the instruments (ie. not whack them so hard). We accompanied it with guitar, and lots of quiet triangle, bell, and glockenspiel playing, tapping gently on the pulse and working in cycles of eight beats.

Middle Primary

We composed a rousing song for Refugee Week, Big Strong Heart, which included call-and-response verses, and a chorus in 2 parts. At the public performance last week we taught it to the audience and they sang with us. Yesterday at the school concert we taught it to the parents and other students. We accompanied it with four different rhythmic and tuned percussion parts. I have a pretty skilled drummer in the MP class at the moment – I will be coming up with some new project ideas for next term that will engage directly with his skills.

Upper Primary

The UP class performed two items for the end-of-term concert – our percussion piece based on riffs from Beyonce’s song Bellydancer (I assume it is Beyonce – that is what the kids told me), with its very funky 12/8 chorus Shake-a-balika-balika Dancer. Then they performed the song they wrote for the builders, to celebrating the completion of the new library building. They performed this song a few weeks ago, at the opening ceremony for the library, and it was so well-received that we decided to perform it again.

So now I get a break from teaching, which is great. Next week I am back with the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble with a 2-day project based on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and then one day of artist training for the Royal Children’s Hospital. Then I got on a week’s holiday.

Tuned percussion strategy

At Pelican PS I’ve developed a new strategy for building skills in students working with tuned percussion (we have a small range of Orff-style xylophones and metalaphones). They often find it difficult to locate notes on the instruments, or to get used to the leaps and stepwise movement in the parts.

The following strategy came into being one day when, out of the blue, the music room wasn’t available and I didn’t want us to waste a lesson doing something unrelated to our instrumental work. I decided to get the students to sing and play their parts, using vocal sounds and body percussion. Drums were easily covered with chest thumps and patsching. Guiro players mimed their pattern and imitated the guiro sound with their voices.

For the tuned percussion, we had an ostinato:

D-A-D-A

C-G-D

It’s basically a pattern in fifths, following a Dmin, Dmin, C, Dmin chord progression. I got them to ‘play’ it on their bodies, using the following points:

D = knees

A = top of head

C = floor

G = shoulders

They weren’t hitting these body parts in order to make a sound; rather, the intention was to create a visual simulation of the distance between the notes on the xylophone.

The students seemed to enjoy dong it this way. It proved to be a good way to help them memorise the pattern (bear in mind these are children who have not had a lot of regular opportunities to play tuned percussion instruments), to stay focused on the ostinato, and to internalise the sense of distance between the notes. Later, we kept all of these body percussion parts in the piece, and used them as a warm-up before moving onto instruments. I’ve since used it with another class, for a different tune (a more complex one, with stepwise movement as well as leaps), and they too have responded well to this way of practising a riff, away from the instruments.

Feathers and focus

Last week I introduced the Lower Primary students to feather-balancing. This is an activity I learned in a circus skills workshop, and it is the most wonderful task. It involves balancing a peacock feather on the palm of your hand, or the tip of your finger. As you get more skilled you can try balancing it on other parts of the body, such as the nose or forehead.

The trick to keeping your feather upright and balanced is to keep your eyes on ‘the eye’ of the peacock feather (the brilliant, brightly coloured top-piece of the feather design). Maintaining this kind of steady eye contact in one direction is very challenging for a lot of the students at the Language School – maybe it is for primary school students everywhere. They tend to look to me or their teacher for direction, reassurance, or approval (perhaps because they quickly get in the habit of watching the teacher and other students for all cues about what to do).

Marko’s eyes lit up when I demonstrated the task.  (He is the very bright, articulate boy I wrote about a few weeks ago, still coming to grips with reading). “I can’t do it,” he said almost immediately. But he had’t been looking at the eye of the feather. He tried again, with me calling constantly, “look up!” and “look at the Eye. The Eye!” He got the hang of it then, and the look of pleasure and pride on his face was very satisfying.

Later that day, children from the class raced up to me in the playground. “We liked the feathers!” “I thought that was pretty good!” and “We’ve been practising!” they told me excitedly.

The feather balancing is effective because it is so achievable. Everyone can do it. Some will start to challenge themselves, trying to balance it in different ways. It gets them focusing with their eyes, and with their bodies. Their teacher commented that it was the most focused she’d ever seen some of her students, in their whole time in the school!

I challenge them by getting them to keep their feet in one place, to encourage more focused physical awareness and control. When all of them are balancing their feathers at the same time, it transforms the room into a kind of mystical, other-worldly jungle of strange, bobbing  floating creatures, suspended upwards in the air, gliding their way around the room.

Noise

In my last post I described a tactic I’ve developed at Pelican Primary School that, to my surprise works incredibly well  as a way of introducing instruments, playing techniques, and building focus and participation. It involves just one instrument to be passed around the group, with each person getting to play it, one by one. Nothing else is taking place at this time. Everyone’s attention is on the person with the instrument.

The focus we get when just one instrument is passed around surprised me at first, and surprised the class teacher too. The first time I tried it, the kids had been really badly behaved – disruptive, unfocused, a little bit crazy… we started the one-instrument-taking-in-turns idea about two-thirds of the way through the lesson. Suddenly they were calm!

I wonder if it is the fact that there is just ONE THING going on in the circle. They all focus on it. Their interest in instruments is genuine… also, perhaps they see that they are going to get a turn, and so are happy to wait for that (and sense that they should behave well, or they might miss out). It is a visual activity as well as a physical one – they can see what is going on throughout the task.

I also wonder if they struggle with the noise level when multiple instruments are passed around the circle. Not only does this create confusion about where their attention should be directed, it may trigger a kind of panicked ‘chaos’ reaction in their brains.

Earlier this term a brass quintet came to perform for the students. The whole school was in the hall for the concert, and apparently they were pretty naughty. The next day in the staff room, teachers told me about it, shaking their heads in a kind of amazed horror at the memory of it.

It was at this time that I began to wonder if in fact these children don’t cope very well with too much noise (which is ironic, because they generate a lot of it). Unfamiliar or unexpected noise can be a very stressful thing. Hearing loss or damage can cause people stress and make them respond in a snappy way all of a sudden if constant jarring noise is inflicted upon them (like the players sitting in front of the brass in a confined orchestra pit, for example). I wonder if a lot of the Pelican students have a similar, reflex reaction to unfamiliar, loud sounds. They get overwhelmed, they feel a little panicked or over-excited inside, and they don’t have the self-discipline (or group discipline) to have a programmed, calm response when this happens.

Interesting… What can I do to help them? Develop their listening skills… playing music that gradually adds parts could help, as they will be actively involved in noticing and accepting each new part as it is added, and hearing/experiencing how it ‘locks in’ rhythmically… Encourage them to listen critically to recorded music and its elements… encourage attention to good quality of sound when they play… see if they can articulate how they experience live music in their heads and in their bodies, thus hopefully building greater awareness and understanding of the experience, both physically and mentally. And emotionally.

The wonderful clarity of western-style notation

I’ve found myself in the middle of a really interesting project with the Middle Primary students at the Language School. A focus this term on pulse has taken us into working with simple rhythmic notation (using crotchets, quavers and rests – or quarters, eighths, and rests, as you prefer). I hadn’t planned to introduce western-style notation this term – in fact, I’m not sure it has ever featured in my work at the Language School – but now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m not sure why it hasn’t been a feature.

For one thing, it’s visual. And it can be ‘read aloud’ by the students using simple, logical sounds (ta, titi, and sah). It makes sense to them.

We started with whole notes/semibreves. This was not a good place to start, as they hadn’t yet started internalising pulse. Ditto for minims/half-notes. Things really cranked up when we got on to the crotchets and quavers. We began to invent different rhythms. We said them, clapped them, then put them onto untuned percussion instruments. We divided into two, then three groups, and so were playing three different rhythms concurrently.

And here is the joy of it all – it all hung together! Beautifully. “Well, of course!” I can hear all the music teachers chorus,with a slight air of impatience. These tools have been around a long time, because they work. But what is exciting for me is to see just how quickly and effectively they work without much verbal explanation. They are supported by the musically-consistent environment of the music classes (we have strong attention to musical detail); they also enable the children from China and Thailand, some of whom have had music instruction prior to arrival in Australia, to tap into their knowledge and learning from their country of origin.

For the newest arrivals, and those from refugee backgrounds, who tend to be sruggling with literacy and who have had incredibly disrupted schooling, if any schooling at all, it also seemed to make sense. There are five children in the class who fit this description (Horn of Africa, and Middle Eastern nationalities); only one child was clearly still guessing what was going on, the others seemed to have made sense of the task and were gradually piecing things together.

Today, we progressed things further, writing a rhythm, and then adding pitches to it to make a melody. I gave them a 5-note pentatonic scale to work with, and asked them to suggest which pitches should go where. As we progressed through the rhythm, I played them what they had invented so far. We came up with a funky little tune, and learnt it. Applying pitches to a known rhythm was a good challenge even for the most competent students. They had to figure out how to glance quickly at the board, and then back down to their instrument. We did a lot of echoing, so that they could establish a strong aural memory of the tune.

So, now in week four, we have a 3-part rhythm played on a range of instruments, and a melody, which I have started accompanying on the guitar. What’s more, it all hangs together, with very little direction or correction from me. I think the visual representation of what they are playing helps them put the different parts in context with each other, perhaps.

I think it is going to become a song. The school has been asked to perform in a local Refugee Week community celebration at the end of term – I think this Middle Primary song might end up linking to that event.

Slowly coming to understanding

We finished the music term at the Language School last week, and presented our compositions to parents and friends. Only two students were graduating on to mainstream schools this term, which means we will have lots of the same students returning next term.

It was an interesting term. It seemed to take a while to get settled. I suspect I was more distracted by things outside the school for much of the term – redundancy, and the intensive thesis-writing mode I was in, in particular. Each class have lots of new arrivals, so the level of English understanding was almost zilch.

Interesting things to observe were the different ways students started to show their understanding of what was going on. ‘Experiences of success’ can come in many different ways. For example, I see them taking pride and care in knowing how to put the instruments away at the end of the lesson. This sounds like a small thing, but it is probably an act that is familiar, that they can figure out on their own. These newest students – boys and girls – will pass me the instruments one by one, then scout the room for anything further.

In terms of musical development, things happen at their own pace. Middle Primary has a new student from Ethiopia (I think, or maybe Somalia) who has had very little prior schooling. She spent the first couple of weeks positioning herself next to the teacher and looking very lost. She joined in everything until she had to do something on her own (such as say her name in time to a shared beat), at which point she would get very quiet and shy, understandably so. In the class composition she chose to play the glockenspiel, one of a group of four who were all playing the same melody. She never quite got the hand of it. Her teacher sat beside her, guiding her hand, and saying the rhythmic syllables (based on different fruits) out loud. Then she seemed to invent her own part, which we encouraged her to do; musically, harmonically, it worked, but her rhythm was never quite accurate enough to make it truly fit with the other parts, and for a few weeks there, we were all just tolerating it, and those others in her group got progessively louder (and therefore progressively faster) in order to drown her out!

So it was with great delight in our concert that I noticed her making small adjustments in her music, so that it fit better with the other parts around her. Gradually, she was building confidence in what it was she was to play, and therefore slowly getting to a point where she could let the other sounds into her ear, and be guided by them. My sense was that she had dropped into a new level in music, that I think will allow her to experience even greater awareness and success in the lessons next term.

The presence of lots of new students highlights for me the importance of patience, of trusting that understanding comes slowly, or at different speeds for different children, but that it does come. As with their English learning, it is first about exposure to the new language (sounds) and a slow absorbing of the rules and syntax, through experiencing them, rather than having them explained. If the environment is consistent, then understanding grows, and actual abilities can flurish, and start to be developed further.

Happy to report that the strategies are working…

Today was a calmer day with the Lower Primaries. As is my first main strategy, I didn’t introduce any new material this week (to give the newest children the chance to feel familiar with what we are doing, and build confidence), although I did play around with the order of tasks.

We started with our call-and-response song Dham dham dham. I sang it, and they echoed what I sang in response. Because they know the song, they tend to start singing along with me. However, I gradually got them to stop doing this (with a series of pantomime ’shock-horror-indignation’ reactions that I’m sure would embarass me horribly if I were to see myself, but to which the children respond with a smile and renewed effort) and soon the structure of the song was well in place. Then I invited other children to sing the lead part, and they did this very convincingly and confidently, which tells me that they fully understand the structure of the song. Good! We have learned it well, and they are still having fun with it.

It is very endearing to hear their version of the words. I learned them from an English transliteration – possibly what I sing makes no sense to a Hindi speaker (if it is Hindi we are singing – in fact I don’t know) – and they have learned them from me. It is interesting how some of their choices of consonants or vowel sounds are consistent across the class, but differ to what I am singing.

Then, once again I asked them to sit in the chairs while Mel and I brought out the instruments and placed them in a long line.

My small moment of genius today was to call on Tzu to play Twinkle Twinkle to the class on the xylophone. (Remember a couple of weeks ago I reported him playing this during one of our random glockenspiel sessions, and taking us all by surprise?) Tzu took on this role very happily, and it led to us using Twinkle Twinkle as the basis for our playing today. After the count-in, everyone played the rhythm of the words in unison, stopping together at the end of each phrase, and at the end of the song. They then changed instruments, moving one place along the row.

The tactics are working. The class was calmer today. They were calmer around the instruments. They were more focused in their listening. They took pride and care in stopping and starting together in time with the song. And with Tzu playing the tune so accurately on the xylophone, we have been able to set a new benchmark for some of the students to aspire towards. For some, learning and remembering a recognisable tune like Twinkle will be beyond them, but for others, it will be a highly attractive challenge. Having someone to copy makes it seem more achievable.

I won’t be at school next week (taking a week’s leave to go see family in Brisbane and do a yoga retreat in Byron Bay!) but for the week after that I plan to make some small mats to take in with me – another visual cue for them to work out how to position themselves in the space.

Back to square one

I had a challenging day at the Language School this week. Each class presented me with situations that required more patience and open-mindedness than I was expecting, so the next few posts will try to examine what happened, and what the learning is. This post focuses on Lower Primary, the chaos that we experienced, and observations on individual student needs, and strategies to help new students make sense of what is going on.

With all three classes that I teach there, there has been a big influx of new students. This creates a kind of instability/transition in any classroom, but the impact in Language School is even more dramatic because it drastically shifts the balance between those in the class who have already established some English language skills,  and are familiar with the classroom routine, and those who have neither language skills, nor an understanding of how school works.

Nearly at the end of term…

I realise that I haven’t given my usual updates yet on how the different projects at the Language School have progressed this term – and we give our performances next week! So here is a quick run-down on how the different class projects have panned out this term.

Lower Primary

When I came back from Bologna, three weeks into the school term, the Lower Primary students were about to go on an excursion to the Melbourne Aquarium. To help them prepare, their teacher was going through lots of fish-related vocabulary with them. On the walls in their classroom I saw worksheets with the different parts of a fish anatomy labeled (gills scales, tail, fins, etc), and coloured in vibrant hues.

So we started by writing a song about fish.

“Tell me about fish,” I asked. “What do you know about fish?”

They all looked at me blankly. I often ask these very open questions for which the answer is to state the obvious. The children suspect it is supposed to be trickier than that, I think, so they hesitate to answer. I always help them out…

“What do fish have? Do they have … legs?”

No, they all laugh, and tell me quite firmly that fish don’t have legs.

“Okay,” I answer. “Fish don’t have legs – what do they have?”

“Fins!” calls out one child. And so we began to write our song:

Fish don’t have legs. Fish have fins.

Fish don’t have bottoms. Fish have tails.

Fish don’t have hands. Fish have gills.

Fish don’t have hair. Fish have scales.