Music Reflection

What?
Music is the combination of tones and sounds in succession.  Music in the classroom is my favorite thing! It should be in schools for many reasons.  According to the class text, the brain is predisposed to detect patterns and sounds, which means music and academic achievement are linked.  Music is a significant part of life, it's natural, and it uses the whole brain. 

So What?
Being a strong musical learner myself, I plan on incorporating music into my classroom as much as possible.  There are songs out there that cover all subjects, which I can use in many of my lessons.  I'm very passionate about music and believe that it is extremely beneficial in the classroom.  When teaching music to children, it's important to keep it simple.  They will have a much harder time learning material through a song if the song is too difficult.  Repetition is also important.  Our brains need to hear something many times to create meaning from the information.

Now What?
To effectively teach and integrate music into my future classroom, I plan to start researching and collecting songs that I could potentially use for my students.  I can't teach songs if I don't know any.  I hope and plan to express my creativity and let it grow so that I can come up with fun and unique ways to mix music into my class.  One bonus way I'd like to integrate music is to learn how to play music myself.  Bring my ukelele to class for my presentation was fun and engaging, and I would love to do that again, or bring another instrument, in my future classroom.

And of course...
Working in my groups for this project went great.  Unlike the larger groups, it was just Mallory and me.  However, that didn't matter as much as I thought it would.  We split the work evenly, which is always nice.  She got our picture book and printed the little cards while I came up with the lyrics and played along.  The decision to do Utah symbols was both of ours, and in my opinion, that was a good decision.  Through working in teams, I've learned the value of different points of views and ideas.  Collaberation with others can create beautiful, new, interesting things.