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Your new CMEA Bay Section Special Representative for Classroom Music is:
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Kara Ireland D'Ambrosio
Woodside School
3195 Woodside Rd
Woodside, CA 94062
E-mail: kdambrosio@woodside.k12.ca.us. |
Classroom/General Music Page Index
Articles About Classroom and General Music
May, 2007
Whew! We did it again, we made it through another wonderful year guiding our students to achieve excellent muscianship. Another year of teaching the building blocks of music to future orchestra instrumentalist, band instrumentalist, jazz muscians, choir members, and audience members and patrons of the arts; instilling a Life Long Love of Music in our students. Great Job!
This is a great time of the year to begin to reflect on this year's achievements and mistakes. It's a great time to evaulate our own teaching as well as our student's muscianship levels. Writing down in our teaching journal these thoughts so that when we plan for next year's presentations and general music classroom units so that we continue to challenge our students and improve our teaching techniques.
This Winter and Spring I've had the great pleasure of working with two National Board Candidates as their support provider. It has been a wonderful journey that has revived National Board Standards in my own teaching. This is a great time of the year to go to one of the National Board Resource Center at Stanford's Introductory Session (see schedule of sessions on their website: http://nbrc.stanford.edu/). You may also want to seach on-line "national board resource center" to find a center closer to your home.
"It's the most wonderful time of the year..." this tune is still stuck in my head! All year I have had a wonderful time hearing from all of you. Some have written emails asking for General Music Education Resources and some have called with great ideas for interesting workshops at the 2008 CMEA Bay Section Winter Conference. Thank you all for communcating with me your ideas, needs and offering to help. I am already looking forward to another wonderful year as your General Music Representive! Please feel free to contact me as your school year closes or over the summer with ideas for the Winter Conference, questions, National Board questions, or comments. Email: kdambrosio@woodside.k12.ca.us I wish you all a happy, safe and relaxing summer vacation.
Kara D'Ambrosio
Classroom General Music Representative
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Feel free to copy this and distribute in your district:
Seven Important Skills Your Child Learns By Studying Music
- Comprehending. Learning to perceive and derive meaning from musical sounds -- for example, to identify a musical theme -- sharpens your child's ability to comprehend abstractions.
- Solving Problems. The ability to understand a problem and reach an appropriate solution is one of the most important skills your child can learn. Learning the basics of musical language, such as harmony, or interpreting a work through performance teaches this skill.
- Reasoning Logically. Applying particular lessons to other problems and solutions requires sound reasoning. When your child leans to analyze a musical work from a cultural, structural, or historical perspective, or to improvise within a certain musical style, both indicative and deductive reasoning grow stronger.
- Making Value Judgments. Learning to comprehend, consider, and evaluate in music can help your child make informed decisions in other aspects of life. Discriminating between great and lesser works or justifying musical choices in compositions can teach your child how to make and uphold value judgments.
- Using Symbols. The ability to use symbols distinguishes the human race among all forms of life. Learning to read, write, and interpret musical notation provides access to a non-verbal world of thought and strengthens the use of other symbols systems as well, such as mathematics or language.
- Conceptualizing. Your child learns to classify and generalize by learning to identify different types and styles of music, to recognize how different cultures use music for personal expression, and to recognize common elements in different works.
- Communicating. Perhaps the greatest gift of music is its ability to cultivate our feelings and thoughts through non-verbal means. Being able to express these feelings and thoughts, and to respond to them in others, is part of every successful program of music study and indispensable in your child's total development.
Courtesy of The Foundation for the Advancement of Education in Music
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Why We Teach Music
From the Spring, 1998 issue of Da Capo, the Delaware ACDA newsletter:
Music is a science: it is exact, specific, and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor's full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.
Music is a foreign language: most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English-but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.
Music is mathematical: it is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
Music is history: music usually reflects the environment and times of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is physical education: it requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips, cheek and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragm, back, stomach and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music is all of these things, but most of all music is art: it allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring(but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate: feelings, emotion. . . call it what you will.
That is why we teach music! Not because we expect you to major in music. Not because we expect you to play or sing all of your life. Not so you can relax. Not so you can have fun. BUT- so you will be human - so you will recognize beauty - so you will be sensitive - so you will be closer to and infinite beyond this world - so you will have something to cling to - so you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more goodness in short - more life. Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live?
That is why we teach music!
[Author unknown]
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Classroom/General Music Links:
- American Orff-Schulwerk Association. Website for the professional organization of music and movement educators dedicated to the creative teaching approach developed by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman.
- The Autoharp Page. Home page of the Cyberpluckers, a cyberspace autoharp society dedicated to bringing the joys of the autoharp to the nether reaches of the Internet.
- Children's Music Workshop. Music Education Online provides a wealth of online information for anyone interested in school music education.
- Clarus Words & Music for Young People. Musical Plays, Classroom Resources, Recordings,Videos, Books, Teaching Aids, Music Software, CD-ROM for school use.
- Curricular Resources in Music. Annotated links from the Community Learning Network.
- Folk Music Website. Website covering the depth and breadth of folk music resources on the net. It primarily provides an organized set of pointers to other pages but does include original material.
- K-12 Resources for Music Educators. Valuable resources for music educators and students of all areas and educational levels. Regularly updated.
- McGraw-Hill School Division Home Page. Web site for Resource Village, a place for teachers created by the McGraw-Hill School Division, a leading publisher of kindergarten through grade 8 educational materials.
- Music Education Resource Links (MERL). This music education homepage by CMEA Bay Section member Carla Piper is organized to provide links to curriculum resources for each of the nine national content standards as presented by the National Standards for Art Education. There are also links to many other websites. The document, "The School Music Program: A New Vision," is intended for everyone who is interested in the quality of music instruction in America's schools.
- Music Simply Music. A commercial site with advice for helping teachers, parents, students , and vocalists to make music a fun learning experience! The company has a free newsletter and vocal, piano or preschool music programs.
- Organization of American Kodály Educators. This site is designed to promote the Kodály concept of music education in America.
- The Recorder Home Page. Comprehensive international site about the recorder and its music.
- Silver Burdett Ginn Music. Recently acquired by the Scott Foresma company, this online center for elementary school teachers and students, containing a Teacher Activity Center with activities for grades K-6 in reading, math, social studies, and music, and Kids' Central, the award-winning curriculum project that is correlated to SBG textbooks, can now only be accessed through the Scott Foresman main index page.
- zZounds Music Discovery Center. Online musical instrumental retailer.
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