Music

Summer is almost halfway over and kids who haven’t had much enrichment are starting to get bored. Some students have been keeping busy with camps, travel, and activities like watching television and playing video games, but many are looking to be more engaged. Many parents and teachers are looking for easily implemented activities to keep kids’ minds fresh for the remainder of the summer. It has been neat to see students trying out activities from our Summer Slide Buster Series here on the Gateway. If you haven’t tried any, we would love to have you try some this week! For even more ideas, look back through our archives.

As we move through the heat of summer, I want look back to see how well we have been busting that summer slide! Camps, lessons, and summer activities can make it hard for parents to make time for enrichment at home. Holidays and a compressed schedule make planning a challenge for summer classroom teachers, too. Since we have been posting activities for each day, I wanted to compile them in this post so you can come back to those activities when you have time. Be on the lookout for more new resource suggestions on Friday.

The following activities focus on music and math, two subjects that can often be intertwined. These were featured on the Gateway the past few weeks on Music and Math Mondays.

Welcome to week 3 of our Summer Slide Buster series here on the Gateway! We have been having fun choosing and testing activities, and we hope you found some of our suggestions interesting and useful. Whether you are a teacher, a parent, or both, you can find activities on the Gateway to inspire all the kids in your life to keep their minds active during the break.

After the first week of testing the summer slide buster activities with students, I was reminded that the success of any learning activity is directly related to the way it is presented to students. There is a reason that little kids love how Mrs. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus gets so into the things she is teaching. Presenting activities as fun, exciting adventures can help create a cooperative, curious environment: perfect for summer discovery learning.

As a parent and teacher, I have seen the effects of the “summer slide” or “brain drain” both at home and in school. Kids who aren’t given the chance to exercise their brains during the summer break will most likely lose a lot of knowledge they gained during the school year. Parents have the tough job of helping their children stay educated, entertained and out of trouble during the summer months.

“A grounding in the arts will help our children to see; to bring a uniquely human perspective to science and technology. In short, it will help them as they grow smarter to also grow wiser.” - Robert E. Allen – Chairman and CEO, AT&T Corporation

Music is a language of its own. The language of music and the technicalities of music composition may seem daunting and scary to teachers without much of a music background. Understanding, reading, appreciating, and writing music are skills that take years of training and practice to hone. The Gateway to 21st Century Skills has a variety of unique ideas to help you integrate music into your teaching in the context of different subjects and themes.

"I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."
- Albert Einstein

This is a humbling philosophy to think about as a teacher. My job description says “teacher,” but now I’m supposed to be a creator of optimal learning conditions instead? It’s easy to assume that teaching something to your class means that the students all learned it. With the variety of abilities, learning styles, and needs in every classroom (and the possibility that some of the students MIGHT not be listening…) this is not always the case.

The cover of my newest Popular Science announces the 5th annual Inventions of the Year. As I read through some of the ideas, I wonder why I didn’t think of them! The inventions, including a handheld bedbug sniffer, armored stun gloves, and prenatal disease-detecting pens, were mostly developed in peoples’ homes and school laboratories. About half of the featured inventions were created by students, again leading me to wonder how we can inspire students to develop a lifelong drive to create and innovate.

Our discussion of Leonardo da Vinci last week started a great dialog about how to create well-rounded students who are willing and motivated to learn in all different subject areas. I think Kelly Tenkely stated it perfectly in her blog, Dreams of Education, “True learners are multidimensional, they are passionately curious about the world around them.” As we shift gears this week to discuss physics resources, we want to be sure the resources we present are in line with this goal of creating passionate, curious learners throughout the grades.

I love to read success stories like the one Joann shared about the new music teacher at her school. It’s wonderful to see a music teacher step out of their comfort zone to bring the love of music to students, but what about schools like the ones in my town that don’t have a music program at all? How far does a regular classroom teacher have to step out of their comfort zone to successfully bring some kind of music education into an already-crowded curriculum?