Key Idea's in Music Education

 Today's class we further explored the teaching and participation of Orff through traditional balinese Cudamani dance/vocalisation/body percussion. As much as I can appreciate these traditional Balinese practices I don't know how much student interest it would generate in the class room. I found the concepts that were 'chuncked' to be difficult and it was really hard to remember all the interchanging parts. Maybe when learning and teaching this it is better to simplify the parts and limit the parts that need to be memorised. The only down side to changing/simplifying is that it then loses it authenticity of traditional practice. I see the value in this traditional practice and can appreciate, I personally don't think it will generate enough interest in the classroom without changing it/simplifying it. Pictured below is what we performed in class with all interchanging roles: (Can Nampuk) Later in the class we did an activity that included really free dancing to the ...

I got to experience the world of online class today as I was home sick with the flu. In today's class Jim gave us amazing advice and expertise on how to teach Orff and how to make it super engaging and interesting for the students. Jim ran the class through an Orff activity similar to the ones we have done in previous weeks only this week the class got boomwhackers! After this activity Jim spoke about how he likes to discipline a class with silent hand signals with psychology behind being then the child is volunteering and joining in on settling down as if it's an activity. I really like this concept and will be using this within my teaching/tutoring. As a tutor of one on one and group lessons I have realised that settling children down with a raised voice often doesn't work. I found this piece of advice from Jim to be mind blowing and very smart! I have taken a mental note of that process.  Jim also spoke about the importance of a music roll when marking attendance. It is ...

 In today's class we looked at a different form of Orff teaching. The first four weeks of this semester we have focused a lot of the attention to the 'chunking' method. (Line by line chuck sized approach). This lesson the new approach we looked at was the 'whole song' method. The whole song method consists of performing the whole song/body percussion backed up with lots of repetition. After performing the catchy poem to us Belinda asked what line/movement we remembered and asked us to just use that as a start. Lots of repetition followed with new lines/movements progressively being added until the class had fully memorised the song/body percussion. We then incorporated the woodblocks/xylophones in the activity utilising our knowledge of Bordun's and melodic call and response. I personally struggled with the whole song method as my bias lies with the chucking method. I asked Belinda for her views and she said she didn't the see value in the whole song method ...