7/3/2019
Topic:
Students with Disabilities
Brianna Moyer
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This past school year I taught three students who were deaf or hard-of-hearing. Two of the students (6th grade and 3rd grade) were completely deaf, and one student (5th grade) had some residual hearing. All three students chose to participate in music, and each had their own ASL interpreter who came with them to music class. This posed a unique challenge, but I was excited to have them in class and was inspired to find creative ways to make the content accessible to these students without causing them to feel singled-out or miss out on key core concepts. All three students had preferential seating towards the front of the class where they could have a clear sight-line to their interpreter as well as the board and any visual aids that I used. When possible, I also made sure to sit these students near others who they liked/felt comfortable around (and in one case there was another hearing student with some sign language proficiency). Before the lesson began, I quickly briefed the interpreter about what we would be learning that day/anything that they needed to know about certain activities we might be engaging in. This helped the interpreter to be able to assist the student more smoothly throughout the lesson and know if there was anything extra that they needed to communicate to help the student to be successful. I created visual aids for everything that we did, and made sure to use large, clear motions when demonstrating rhythms. All three students were very successful with drumming, and could even accurately echo rhythms by visually watching my motions. I incorporated lots of percussion, especially larger drums that the students could feel more vibration from. I also had a small bluetooth speaker that I placed near the student during listening so that they could feel the vibrations when possible in addition to visually demonstrating the steady beat of any song that was playing. The website Chrome Music Lab was extremely helpful for demonstrating concepts of pitch, and was a hit with the whole class as well! This site has many visual labs such as a spectrogram, visual sound waves, frequency visuals, and even composition using visual aids. Whenever we were singing or studying lyrics of a song, I provided a visual of the lyrics for the whole class, and the students signed along with the words instead of singing. Thankfully all three students were very well-adjusted to the general education classroom setting and were comfortable engaging in lessons and even volunteering to answer questions and demonstrate examples. |
7/7/2019
Topic:
Tools and Strategies
Brianna Moyer
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Two strategies I have implemented in my elementary music classroom across a variety of topics and grade levels are graphic organizers and mnemonic instruction. I have found that these strategies are especially helpful not only for students with disabilities for also for students who do not naturally gravitate toward outwardly singing, playing, or engaging in performance activities. While I do believe that both types of tasks are essential to well-rounded music instruction, these strategies not only provide another modality for students to learn and make connections in a concrete way, but often then build confidence as we move on to the application.
Graphic organizers can be used in elementary music to organize concrete factual information (i.e. parts of an instrument, characteristics of an instrument family, biography of a composer) and also as a tool to help students conceptualize more abstract ideas such as their feelings about a certain piece of music. Graphic organizers are also useful to compare/contrast songs, instruments, styles of music, etc. Active listening is a complex process, and these organizers help students focus on the learning goal, especially for students who struggle to focus on auditory information.
Mnemonic instruction is most famously applied in music education as a tool to learn the names of notes on the lines and spaces of the staff (EGBDF and FACE, etc.). I also use the keyword strategy when introducing and reviewing music vocabulary. I find that using this strategy helps students to increase their retention of these words as well as their ability to accurately and actively apply music vocabulary to the songs we are learning. |
7/20/2019
Topic:
Assessment of Learning
Brianna Moyer
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A few years ago, I taught a 6-1-1 self-contained class for students with disabilities, primarily Autism. For a student in this class that was non-verbal and also could not write/color/draw I created assessments using pictures that the student would point to to demonstrate understanding. This student was monitored one-on-one during the assessment to keep track of his answers, and this proved to be the most successful method for assessing this particular student. For example to assess different types of symbols, I would verbally say "quarter note" and the student would independently point to the quarter note symbol. These assessments were specifically created so that the pictures were laid out clearly with minimal text. I also used picture representation for different tempos (bunny for fast turtle for slow), and visual representations of volume when assessing tempo or dynamics. The assessment would always be given aurally, so that the students would listen and then show their understanding by demonstrating the answer. Another effective method for ongoing assessment was monitoring the performance of the students as they moved and played instruments in response to different prompts. |