Music Teachers! Do you agree with incorporating reading and writing in the music class?Explain.
Have you considered projects for the students to do that will incorporate reading and writing? This article discusses the "Music Writing Project". What do you think about a project like this? How would change it to address all the cultures in your school building? How would make changes to the project? If you have incorporated writing in your music class, what are some creative ways you have incorporated writing in your class? What were the results? Discuss?
It depends on what the writing and reading is on. If the paper or reading passage is not related to what we are currently learning in class, than no I do not. My goal is to always have students best interest at heart. Students now a days, do not what to learn about Mozart or Beethoven. Especially the students I work with on a daily bases. They want more composer more relevant to them. This could be the composer has the same colored skin as they do or they are from the same culture. I feel like it is always important to have the students best interest at heart. Music class is also supposed to be a fun class. My goal is always to have a calm and fun class with my students and even do it in a way where students do not know they are learning. A lot of the reading strategies they learn in ELA class, can be applied to music class. Recorders are a good example for this. If a student receives a piece of music and they need to CODE the song in a way to help them understand, than that is completely fine. Students are allowed to write a definition of a dynamic or circle a note they might not know to ask their teacher later. I really do like the idea of 'Music Writing Project'. This helps students listen to a piece of music and be able to have an image in their head. They can then write down the image they are seeing. This does help the students to express themselves. All students are different and they might see different things. They are showing their individuality by doing this. I would change it to being music that is from that specific country in the world. I do have a lot of African-American students and Hispanic students. My students currently are singing 'We are Family'. All of my students are getting really into it. This is a song from 1979. This is way before their time and they are able to identify and connect with the song. The reason I feel like they do is because they are seeing their specific culture on the screen. They are able to relate in that way to the song. I would not change anything about this project. I have incorporated writing into my classroom before. I either ask them to write about what we talked about that day or have them explain something they like about music class or what do they not like about music class. My reasoning for this is if a student is not comfortable sharing with the class, than they do not have to. This also always me to see if I need to change the way I am teaching something. Mostly it has been a very positive experience.
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