What I Teach the First Month of Kindergarten
So we’ve decided what we want to teach. We’ve chosen our musical materials. Now it’s time to plug it all in.
Today I’m sharing how I’ve planned the first month of Kindergarten.
Goals:
My main musical goals this month are to develop steady beat, and an awareness of the 4 voices. I also want them to get used to following classroom procedures and learn how to move in our classroom space.
Nuts and Bolts:
I see my kindergartners for 45 minutes on a 6 day rotation. That means roughly 3 times a month. It’s not much time so we have to make the most of it!
Rhythm: Developing Steady Beat
These are some of my favorite songs and rhymes for developing steady beat this month:
Engine Engine
Apples Peaches
Chop Chop
Hey Betty Martin
Jonny Works with 1 Hammer
Pitch: Developing the Singing Voice (4 voices)
To help awareness of the 4 voices I use many of the same pieces and songs.
Engine Engine
Goodnight, Sleep Tight
Little Kitty Cat
Doggie Doggie
Apples, Peches
Putting It Together: A Peek at my Unit Plan
With pieces and songs all figured out, we need to decide what to do with them. That’s where my unit plan comes in.
Mix of Kodaly, Mix of Orff
This unit plan follows the large Kodaly structure of Prepare, Present, Practice. I absolutely love this approach because it makes you think about the point of each element - what does it look like broken down? Within the prepare and practice structure, typically teachers think through the physical, visual, and aural activities they want to do. That’s where the tweaks come in.
After my Orff level training this summer I decided I need a better way of incorporating the Orff process in my mostly Kodaly model. I was especially inspired by Jane Frazee’s book, Artful, Playful Mindful.
I replaced the traditional physical, visual, aural with Imitate, Explore, and Respond. I still think through the different modes of learning I ask my students to do, but with a new emphasis on individual student creation and exploration of concepts.
So far, I love it.
Here’s a peek at what part of my concept plan looks like for steady beat.
Lesson plan time!
Once this is done, the easy part begins. I simply transfer these ideas into my lesson plans and create a teaching process.
Thinking through how I will introduce each activity is really valuable. I may choose to repeat an activity to give students enough time to explore it. Or I might combine more than one activity in each class.
Plan-Schlan
Of course you know that sometimes unit plans go the way you expect and sometimes they don’t. Information from the pre-assessment may cause me to tweak or extend some activities. Alternatively, information from the pre-assessment may cause me to zoom through material on which I would have spent large amounts of unnecessary time.
The details in this unit plan will change, but the process stays the same. It’s so exciting to look at my Kindergarteners and know that I have a plan for their learning, ways of assessing them, and pathways toward their own unique creativity.
If you think the unit plan would be helpful to you, I'd love for you to check it out. You can find it here.
Happy teaching!
