A further exploration of the efficacies of the MIENC’s ‘Music Plus Music Integration’ (M+MI) initiatives in laboratory school settings. This video highlights the work of the Atrium School (Watertown, MA) and its M+MI Choral Program, led by music director (and former MIE@NEC Guided Intern) Michael Glicksman, who is now in his second year of teaching at the Atrium School.
At long last, we have posted a video of the violin program’s learning demonstration, presented at the Atrium School’s Winter Solstice Assembly. (Video of the choral program coming next!)
In addition to the demonstration and performance by Atrium 2nd and 3rd graders, you will also hear reflections from violin teacher Helen Liu, program visionary Larry Scripp, Atrium parents and co-principals Susan Diller and Linda Echt.
Hi blog readers! The video below documents some activities and conversations in the 2/3/10 meeting ‘Improvisation in Music Education,” and a clip from a lesson I taught on 2/4/10. I’ve had a lot of fun applying these ideas to my teaching and my music this past week! Enjoy the video by clicking on the link below.
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve posted any new reflections or videos about our violin program… but not to worry, many new developments have occurred, and we have just been a little backlogged with all the new material to report. Since the new year began, we have made several improvements to our weekly violin sessions at Atrium.
We are now meeting in smaller sections of 30 minutes per session; about 4-6 students per section rather than 8-10. This improves each class because we are able to give each student more individual attention, and the students receive more teaching time per capita. It also makes our collaborative learning activities more manageable.
Each week we are now ‘theme-ing’ our classes using a Word of the Week. The idea came because we wanted to encapsulate each week’s lesson with one word, giving students the ability to define those words experientially.
This week’s word is “deliberately,” which Tyler defined as “doing something with purpose,” and how Beatrice defined as “being careful.” In violin class, this means that everything we do is decisive and with purposeful intent. When putting our bows on the string and preparing to play, we do so with exemplary posture (bunny ears holding the ‘carrot’, feet in the right position, etc.) and without making a single sound.
Our continued emphasis on reflection has resulted in multiple venues and opportunities for students to reflect. In addition to informal verbal reflection throughout the class session, we challenge students to express themselves in written and artistic forms. As described in these two previous blog posts (11/11/09 and 11/3/09), our unit and lesson plans are organized around the ‘Five Learning Processes’ framework (a.k.a. LQCPR—Listen, Question, Create, Perform, and Reflect). Though most of our previous written reflections have fallen into the last category, we are now starting to propagate the other sections too. In fact, we filed this week’s reflection activity under the Questions & Explorations section in student portfolios because of the explorative questions it poses:
We have also started building time for our written reflection activities into our sessions. Part of this is more possible because our classes are now being taught in the Library. There’s an alcove that we use for the instructional portions of class, and then the students move to a large study table to write their reflections.
In addition to using animals (zoo, monkey, buffalo, alligator) and Indian rhythms (cha, taki, gamela, takidimi), violin students are finding connections between Violin students are using their school project heroes (e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, etc.) to explore the connection between word prosody and rhythms. More on this to come.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series documenting the Atrium School M+MI Program’s Violin Project. Documentation efforts, including this post, are being led by NewsBlog moderator Randy Wong.
In addition to learning the basics of being a violinist (like knowing what the parts are called on a violin, and how to hold the thing), a key component of the Atrium School violin project comes in the integration of the students’ regular music curricula with violin instruction.
For the past two years, Atrium students have received innovative ‘music plus music integration’ (”M+MI”) curricula designed by the Music-In-Education National Consortium, and implemented by a Music Learning Leadership team consisting of music teachers, teaching artists, and guided interns trained by the Center for Music-In-Education. Understanding symbol and coordinate systems are among other music literacy skills the Atrium M+MI curricula stresses; it is through the use of music-math matrices that said skills are taught.
Therefore, integrating and adapting music-math matrices for the violin program is a total no-brainer! In the video below, students are taking the first steps towards adapting their knowledge of music-math matrices to violin playing. Their violin teachers (Beatrice Affron and Helen Liu) chose simple matrix operations (e.g. identifying and singing pitches “Re” and “La”) to match with their new motor skills (i.e. plucking the open D and open A strings, respectively) on their instruments. The video below shows this in action, and also acts as a reference for Atrium parents who may be helping their children practice.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series documenting the Atrium School M+MI Program’s Violin Project. Documentation efforts, including this post are being led by NewsBlog moderator Randy Wong.
Students at the Atrium School (Watertown, MA) are the newest cohort to pilot the MIENC’s ‘Music Plus Music Integration” Program Violin Project. (Last summer, students from across Mankato, MN received M+MI violin instruction for ten weeks). The videos below show a glimpse of what the first day of instruction looked like.
I found it exhilarating to experience how excited the students were when they received their instruments for the first time. The buzz in the air was definitely electric.
Yet for all the energy in the room, the students were able to contain and focus it on learning. Among the first activities was learning how to stand in Rest Position.
Also: How to hold the violin securely with one’s chin.
Students also learned the “body parts” of the violin, thanks to a song that Helen made up in which each part of the violin corresponds to a scale degree. The first lyric, “This is the scroll” begins at the bottom of the scale. As the scale ascends, the students learn each successive part of the violin; for example, “These are the tuning pegs” is sung on scale degree 2. While I was confused at first why Helen started at with the scroll—I always visualized the scroll as the “top” of the instrument—after thinking about it, I realized her rationale has to do with the pitch range of the strings! “Open” strings (meaning: unfingered) have the lowest pitches on the instrument. As one lays fingers down on the finger board, the pitches get higher. Thus, even from what-could-be a simple song, she’s laying down the framework for teaching students about pitch and intonation. Very clever.
Hello MIE Blog community! I am doing an internship this semester (along with fellow intern Joanna Mattrey) as a participant and documentation specialist for a class titled “The Percussive Parent”. The class is held at the Gentle Dragon Preschool in Medford, Massachusetts under the direction of Warren Senders, a current MIE instructor at NEC. Twelve adults and their children are enrolled in the course which meets every Wednesday afternoon for ten weeks. The class involves, among many things, counting and number games, handclapping activities, instrument-making, the use of found objects converted into instruments, producing music with drums and percussion, simple movement activities, along with methods and techniques for parents to incorporate what they have learned into the time they spend with their children outside of class. Warren’s goal is that, by the end of the ten week period, “group members will be able to direct multigenerational rhythm groups on their own, using traditional, self-made and spontaneously created instruments.” He explains that the course is not for children and their parents, but rather for parents and their children so that the children can learn (if they want to) from their active parents while the parents learn musical methods for teaching their children.
For my guided internship this semester, I plan on using Warren Senders’ class “The Percussive Parent” as a way of investigating the ways in which children learn from and imitate their parents, the experience and growth of a child in a creative musical environment, and also how to develop and organize a community course directed towards a specific audience in a free-thinking learning environment. Through this, I will be able to document and experience the organization hands-on while also playing a role in the teaching and learning process of building instruments, experiencing and applying rhythmic games and tools, and utilizing mundane or found objects to create a musical learning experience.
This internship will serve as an application of previous work that I have done with Warren Senders. In addition to completing his two MIE courses (Cross Cultural Approaches to MIE and Improvisation in General Music), I completed an internship as a documentation specialist for his Cross Cultural Approaches to MIE course last semester. In this course, and through my internship, we investigated, among many things, different cultural methods of education, specifics and speculation on the nature of memory, instrument building, intrinsic knowledge, music in education, and more. This internship will follow on the heels of the previous as a hands-on application of techniques and topics discussed with Warren Senders throughout his courses.
An interesting hypothesis that Warren shared before the start of the course, was that “our kids will be much more likely to make music together if they see us making music together. We will be modeling music-making behavior for our kids…and, of course, making music ourselves.” It is an exciting and fascinating premise, that by being an active learner as a parent and teacher, our children and students will most frequently follow our example through imitation and/or a desire to be like their adult role model. I will continue to investigate and document such patterns throughout the course of the class, and share insights with you as we go along. Joanna and I will also be collaborating on information and musings in order to give you a wider ranging perspective on the progress made throughout the ten weeks of the course.