Maybe the Jackson Five Were Right

Don't blame it on the sunlight,

Don't blame it on the moonlight,

Don't blame it on the good times

Blame it on the boogie...

Dance, expressive movement, moving to music.  Call it what you will, we all do it in our own way, but it seems to me that we rarely use it effectively in our classrooms...

As part of my ongoing interest in Orff Schulwerk in the Music Classroom I am reading Doug Goodkin's Play, Sing & Dance (Schott 2002), which I would throughly recommend for all Music Teachers, even those who, like me, have two left feet!  This said, I have just been reading Chapter's 6-7 and I am now feeling like I am a bad music teacher...

These chapters focus on dance and movement in the music classroom and laments how, as a educational tradition, we are very good at stamping out movement as part of the learning experience.  Unless of course it has been put into the lesson plan as a focussed activity, or is part of PE, in which case it is divorced from the active participation of the musical element; that is reacting to recorded music rather than music and movement being produced at the same time.  We are also obsessed that pupils cannot possibly be listening unless they are quiet and sitting still.  Goodkin discusses how Music and Movement go hand in hand and that, rather than suppressing these impulsive connections, we should be encouraging them more.

Eureka moment!

I am now thinking that as the school I am presently teaching in is mainly EAL (over 90%), with many pupils coming from backgrounds where listening and dancing to Music is not so important, I may have been doing the pupils a disservice through not allowing more impulsive movement in the learning of songs and listening.  In the last couple of months I have started doing this more since reading about Orff Schulwerk, but more of these kinds of activities, especially in the younger years might really be useful.

Initial thoughts are for adding movement in, both in more and less structured ways:

1. Marching to music for fast and slow, which I already do - but really enforce marching to the beat and listening to the music.
2. Allowing moving to songs as we learn them (such as swaying) or focusing on songs which promote this (e.g. Taba Naba is a good one) - from this I could then get pupils to come up with their own movements.

1. 'Growing' as the music gets higher and 'shrinking' as it gets lower.
2. Using their bodies to get into shapes that they feel the music suggests (easy one - Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star).
3. Miming the instruments they can hear.
4. To help with pitch recognition, with a little practice, the pupils could use hand signals to map pitch range - solfegge with more advanced classes or just tapping the rhythm on different parts of the body (Frere Jacques - start with toes, knees and hips before hips, shoulders and head etc).

I will be trying some of these ideas out in the next SoW I create.  We will have to see what comes from it - maybe I might even start moving in time to the music myself