My Year 6 music class experimented with serialism and tone-rows but using a diatonic scale (A B C D E F G) rather than a chromatic one (ie with all the semitones). I used the phrase ‘Rainbow Tone Row’ to link in with out use of BoomWhackers. Although this does somewhat negate serialsims goal of
Tags: curriculum, music theory, serialism, vocabularyTeaching
New Australian Readers’ Theatre series published.
Yay! Blake Education’s new ‘Australian Readers’ Theatre’ series has arrived from the printers! It’s been great fun working as series consultant with editor Vanessa Barker and publisher Lynn Dickinson and to have six plays included alongside those of the talented Sandie Eldridge, Catherine Bauer and Elizabeth Klein. It’s a great series (all photo-copiable) with lots
Tags: Blake Education, drama, Readers' TheatreRed Beach School New Zealand Compass Rose Performance
A big shout out to Jill McTeigue and the students of Red Beach School. Loved your photos from Compass Rose! Your sets and costumes look gorgeous and I hope you had a great time putting it on! One lovely touch; Red Beach borrowed our original prop ‘Compass’ (to the right in the featured photograph) and
Emergency Radio Drama Unit
This year’s theme for World Radio Day was ‘Radio In Time of Emergency‘. I developed this drama unit for Year 5 & 6 around that theme with a focus on improvised dialogue, characterisation and structure. The lesson sequence is based on the 5Es teaching model, familiar to many teachers from working with the Primary Connections science modules.
Tags: 5Es, drama, lesson plan, radioSunSmart Training
It’s the summer term here in Australia, which means students have to wear hats during playtime at school. The SunSmart site came up while researching ideas for ‘No Hat/ No Play’ signs for our schoolyard. After a quick registration, I completed the online teacher training. It’s pretty basic – quizzes, animations, text to read – but provides
Music Alphabet Cards
“Music Mind Games” (Michiko Yurko, Warner Bros Publications) is an outstanding resource for any music educator, especially so if you’re planning on teaching any aspect of music theory. With its emphasis on cooperative learning, hands-on games and ‘joyful learning’ the simple, focused and fun games can be used to teach everything from the basic music alphabet
Lego Moviemaker App Manual
I’ve been using the Lego Movie Maker app with our students for a while now. The app is free (yipee!) and although it’s a bit clunky in places it’s proven a real hit with children from ages 6-14. If you do any stop motion animation on the iPad or iPhone give it a go. And feel free
Tags: manual, stop motion animationSocrative polling app
I saw the Socrative student polling app demonstrated at the Music Ednet ‘Daytime‘ music conference. Socrative is free (basic use) and consists of a teacher module where quizzes, questionnaires and resource materials are assembled and a class module where students logon (via the website or app) to take part in the poll. Our demonstration had
Australian Curriculum Music & Drama Skills / Knowledge Overviews
First term is program writing term. With existing courses in desperate need of alignment, I used the information on the Australian Curriculum site to create a short, easy to read summaries of the relevant Music Skills & Knowledge and Drama Skills & Knowledge. The summaries are in pdf format; contact me for the editable Word documents. R-8 Drama
Tags: curriculum, knowledge, skillsFree Japanese Language Posters
I made this set of basic Japanese Language Posters for our school classrooms. Each has the Romaji for simple greetings, introductions and phrases, the hiragana / katakana equivalents below and the equivalent English above. There’s a simple pronunciation guide in the top right hand corner and a QR code link to a pronunciation site. Download
Tags: free, Japanese, language, Posters