Articulation Ideas

Sorry it's been such a while since we've had an update, folks!  I wanted to share some ideas I have been trying out with my 5th graders to help them understand various types of articulation.

I got the idea from a teacher's inservice we just had a few weeks ago.  A speaker was presenting on student motivation and on increasing teacher effectiveness.  Well, I always go into those inservices aware that most of it might not apply to teaching music, but I try to take everything they say and see if it can relate to teaching band.  Fortunately, this time, it actually worked!

The speaker would say words relating to his presentation and use motions to go along with those words. Then he had us repeat the words and motions back to him to help us remember and understand the words. I thought this might work great for teaching music vocabulary.

So one day I decided to try it with articulations with my 5th grade bands.  We started off with just a few basic ones at first: accent, slur, and staccato.   For accent, I said "ACCENT" (with an emphasis) and used a punching motion to get them to realize it gets more "umph," more emphasis.  They say it and repeat it back to me.   Then I said "staccato!" very short and made a quick flipping of the wrist motion (as I would in conducting staccato).  Then they said it and repeated the motion back as well.  For slur, I simply said "slluuuuuur" and made a rainbow type motion to demonstrate what a slur looks like in the music and to demonstrate how smooth and connected a slur makes the music sound.    Then they repeated it back.  After I would name and motion each articulation, I would tell them the definition as well.  "Staccato!  Short and detached."    "ACCENT!  With EMPHASIS!"    "Slurrrrr.  Tongue only the first note and not the rest.  Smooth."

After a week or so, we ran into some new articulations in one of our concert songs, "Imperium" by Michael Sweeney (great piece for beginning band).   We ran into tenuto and marcato.  I simply went with my own instinct and decide to show tenuto by putting my hands close together and then moving them outward and away from each other as if lengthening something.  This hopefully gives them the impression of filling up or lengthening something a little bit to get them to realize tenuto means giving the note full value.  For marcato, I simply made the gesture of what it looks like on paper.  An upside down peace sign.  (They really like this one).   We give the "upside down peace sign" or marcato gesture very quickly and with emphasis so they realize it's another type of accent.

They LOVED it!  They really like to respond and repeat what I say and do. After a number of days of repeating the name and gesture, I would just do the motion and ask them "what's this?" and they would immediately respond with the correct word and sometimes the definition, too.

(I should also add, however, that I model for them the SOUND of the articulation as well when I am first introducing a new type of articulation.  This is an important part of teaching them how to play it.  It's not all about recognition of the articulation symbol or the definition - they need to be able to hear how it should sound and do it on their own instruments as well.)

Here are some great benefits of teaching articulation this way:

• Kinesthetic learners can benefit from the gestures and hands on activity.
• Students are saying the articulation aloud so they learn how to speak in Italian musical terms
• The gestures relate to my conducting gestures so when I am conducting a song and they watch me make a certain "articulation gesture," they instantly recognize which one it is and hopefully respond correctly on their instruments with that articulation.
• Saying & repeating the gestures and names is easy enough that every kid can feel successful in the activity.
• It takes only seconds to teach an articulation without a long definition.  It takes only seconds to reinforce each day.
• The kids think it's fun!
• Some of the gestures model what the symbol looks like on paper too (slur, marcato, tenuto) so maybe they can recognize the meaning of the symbol on paper more quickly.

I have seen a lot of success in this so far.  I will be interested to see if they have become aware enough of all of the articulation symbols and their meanings to start applying them without my reminders.  But even if they're not quite aware of it all yet or able to do it without me- it is so easy to reinforce an articulation by stopping the band and silently making the gesture.  They get it and they play it that way and we move on.   

Let me know if you've found any success with this method or with your own ways of teaching articulation!

Seven Quick Takes

-1-

IMEA conference was a blast! It was so much fun to go as a real live educator this year. When I looked at music, I thought of my students. When I listened to the clinics, I thought of my students. And when I went to work today, I was excited to try some of the things I'd learned and do better for my students. The only hard thing about going to IMEA (as Emma mentioned too) is that it's hard to apply a lot of the things to my own program and classes right away. But it is better to attend the conference and get those ideas than not to attend and get stuck in a teaching rut (which is what I was already starting to feel a little bit this semester already).

-2-

Last week I had the greatest teaching moment I've ever had. I was teaching a guitar lesson after school to a 4th grade girl. She's quite mature for her age and she's very outgoing and talkative. Well, we got to learning some Em and Am chords and we started joking around, telling sad stories with the minor chords changing back and forth in the background. Then in the end, we finished the song with a lovely EMaj chord and a happy ending. She LOVED it! But that wasn't even the best part. We moved on after that, just practicing some other basic chords like G, C, and D, but she was still hung up on the basic song we made earlier with the minor chords. So as I continued to play the G, C, and D chords, she stopped playing with me and started singing a new song with the chords I was playing. And I added a line, then she added another line, then we went back and repeated the chorus....and before we knew it, we had an even better song written than the one before! She couldn't stop talking about how cool that was! She said "We should write a song every time we have a lesson!" She was IN AWE. She was EXCITED about MUSIC. She wanted to record it and burn a CD and sell it and perform at places! She walked out of the building saying "I had the best day ever! Thank you, Miss (Sara)!" It was like...straight out of a movie or something.

Not only was it fun to be writing a silly song with student, but I could see it "click" in her. She got it. She got what music was all about! It expressed her story, it expressed her emotions, it was FUN. It was so cool to see that happen.

-3-

Next week I'm going to try new lesson groups with the 5th and 6th graders. At this point in the year, I have a good idea of the abilities and talents of each student, and I can see that just grouping them by instrument for their lessons is holding some of the advanced players back. And then some of the struggling students aren't getting the attention they need. So I grouped each class into 3 different groups - Advanced, Intermediate, and Beginner. I decided every "beginner" (even if they're in 6th grade) will get his/her own private lesson so we can really focus on their needs. The Intermediate groups are not going to be moving slowly but not super fast either. I tried to still group these "intermediate" kids by instrument, timbre or tessitura. And then the Advanced group will obviously be a quick-paced group. I'm excited to see how far those kids can really go when they're all put together for lessons.

-4-

I'm starting a harmonica/blues unit in 5th/6th grade music on Thursday (which also happens to be my 2nd evaluation day for the year). I'm a bit nervous about it because, honestly, I don't really know how to play harmonica very well yet, haha. But thanks to fellow-blogger Mary, I think this will be a fun unit for the kids. I ordered each student a harmonica from westmusic.com.

-5-

I've been thinking about attending the Conn-Selmer Institute this June. Anyone out there have any thoughts about this?

-6-

Today is snow (ice) day #7 for me and I plan to finish working on the harmonica unit, do some laundry (ugh), and find the rest of the music we're going to play at the Spring Concert. I'm going to use this new book and CD of recordings I just got to aid in my decision-making. At IMEA I bought "Teaching Music Through Performance in Beginning Band" and I'm very excited about it! The high school series is supposed to be great and very popular, so I'm hoping the beginning band version will be as helpful.

-7-

Have I mentioned that my district is consolidating next year? Yes, it's true. No one knows what they will be teaching or where exactly. But I have already been dreaming up plans for 5th/6th grade band and possibly middle school & high school choir. More specifically, I want TECHNOLOGY! I want AT LEAST a projector in my room that I can hook up to SmartMusic. It would be so helpful for beginning band since SmartMusic has Accent on Achievement in the library. I'm not sure how to go about asking for a projector or for SmartMusic, so I'll try to post about it later.

A personal goal

Life in the country schools is all-around good; my kids are pretty darn good kids and I work with good people. But I'm realizing more and more (through failure) that teaching is really about having a lot of patience and love.

The past couple of weeks I have been trying to get my kids to work super hard on a marching band song we're playing from memory in a Halloween parade. It's been slow-going, and I've been getting extremely frustrated with small things and with my students in general. I have been jumping all over them and giving them lots of talks about how they have to take this seriously and get memorizing and pay attention in class more. I get angry quickly. I snap at students who interrupt me or who just happen to be looking away at the moment I look to them to see if they're paying attention. I sometimes talk down to them when they irritate me. And I realized last week, that is not the teacher I want to be.

The teacher I want to be is one full of love and patience. I don't want to be consumed with getting my students to create the best performance they can and with doing whatever it takes to get them there. No; I want to be consumed with developing young musicians - young people - that are going to work hard but still enjoy what they are doing. ...That are going to be good people who have experienced love and respect from adults and who are eventually going to become those adults. I shouldn't have to jump all over them for small things just because MY patience is lacking and just because I may be getting frustrated. We should be able to get things done AND have fun. And I really do think that if the students are enjoying band and having fun, they will want to keep working and practicing and making things better.

So I've come up with a personal goal this week to just be more patient and loving towards my kids. Love is what they need most anyway; so many of them get yelled at enough at home and from other teachers - I don't need to contribute to that. And I think what will help me most with being patient is just trying to have fun with them and laughing more. Like, by remembering the day they all held their instruments on their heads as hats. Wish I had had a camera. :)

And for a nice laugh...you can enjoy watching this trombone tumble: (Look near the 40 yard line on the right side of the 50)

Beginning band reminder

A reminder about teaching beginning band: