Teaching Portfolio
Planning and Teaching
1. Engine Engine Number 9
Created for kindergarten and 1st grade music classes, the following lesson teaches beat-keeping, tempo, and rhythmic imitation through a chant and iconic representation. Students participate in keeping the beat with body percussion before learning a classic children's chant, Engine Engine Number 9. The chant builds rhythmic skills throughout the lesson that can be applied to other songs. Students can explore the chant by changing the tempo and visualizing it. In the end, students will be able to differentiate between rhythm and beat, an invaluable skill for years to come.
The following video shows part of this lesson coming to fruition. You can see me model the chant Engine Engine Number 9 for the students in small parts, ensuring they are staying in time, enunciating their words, and remembering the words as we progress through the chant. Later in the lesson after exploring tempo, my teaching lab partner and I show the students the chant in iconic representation and teach it to them in a similar way to teaching the chant itself to ensure long-term retention. Students show what they learned by combining the spoken words of the chant with performing the iconically represented rhythms of the chant by clapping.
2. Exploring the Rhythms of Jazz Swing
This lesson is the second lesson of a 4-lesson curriculum unit entitled "I Got Rhythm." The curriculum unit exposes students to rhythms, instruments, and songs of jazz funk, swing, and subgenres of Latin jazz music. This second lesson on jazz swing music builds off of the beat-keeping skills students developed in the first lesson by imitating a jazz funk drum set and keeping the beat with a jazz funk tune. After the opening of the lesson, which reinforces skills taught in the last lesson and applies them to jazz swing rhythms, the lesson is split into 3 parts. These parts, moving, listening, and singing, apply jazz swing repertoire to teaching students about the instruments, rhythmic feel, and songs of the 20th century jazz swing era.
The following video shows parts of this lesson coming to fruition. Inspired by the Orff approach, students learn the drumset rhythms of jazz swing with accompanying words which also connect to the first song they will listen to afterward, "Take the A Train." The song is used to teach students about how mutes can alter a trumpet's sound and helping students become familiar with AABA form. Once students become comfortable with the rhythmic feel of swing, they end the lesson by learning the first two verses of "A Tisket A Tasket," originally sung by Ella Fitzgerald.