1/4/2017
Topic:
Students with Disabilities
Shawn Pendry
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I had a visually impaired student with a beautiful voice placed in my advanced chorus. We didn't have the luxury of using braille music becuase she was still learning braille reading and her vision specialist did not think it wise to add the musical symbols at that time. We made part recordings of music for her to learn the literature. When it was a music theory or sight reading lesson, I would have her go to one of our practice rooms where we had pianos and she would learn a simple piano piece by ear which I had selected and recorded onto CD for her to repeat play as many times as necessary. My thinking was to build the aural skills until she was ready to pick up braille music. |
1/4/2017
Topic:
Tools and Strategies
Shawn Pendry
|
I have had several students with fluency issues related to processing disorders. With these students I use Computer Assisted Instruction with rhythm performance because it gives a visual representation of success and areas of growth that I can not verbally replicate. I use a program called "Musition" in which a metronome ticks and the user clicks the space bar to the rhythm on the screen. The benefit to using technology is that the program shows the exercise after they have completed it with Green over lay for every note hit in time, Yellow for early or late and Red for missed notes. Being able to see the yellow and try again to bring them to green really assist the students in understanding how to read a rhythm in time. |
1/4/2017
Topic:
Assessment of Learning
Shawn Pendry
|
I had a student in my music composition class who was learning with orthopedic impairment (severely limited use of both arms). She has a paraprofessional that generally wrote down information for her or helped her with a voice-memo style laptop. When it came to music compositions, she had great ideas, but was unable to use a piano or to write on manuscript and her para was not a musician. For the first two quarters, I allowed her to notate each composition in segments with a separate due date to allow for a process that we created where she would create voice recordings and her para or mother would send to me via email so I could drop my interpretation of her words into finale. The next class, I would have a print out of what I thought she meant and she would make a recording with corrections. Sometimes she would say things like "the cello needs an arpeggiated F chord in 8th notes" and sometimes she would just sing in solfege a melody that she wanted over a certain section. It was tedious, but allowed her to show mastery and to be able to create. By half way through the year, her para had learned enough to do part of the translating for me so I only had to tweak the finale file. |