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Selected to Speak @ Arts Education Conference!

I’m excited and honored to be one of the professionals selected to present at the annual Arts Education Conference. Sponsored by Ingenuity and CPS Arts this conference is highlighting the importance of offering consistent and relevant professional development and to stimulate and nurture more collaborative work between teachers and arts education partners, Ingenuity and the CPS Department…

Puerto Rico: Rhythm & Culture

Puerto Rico has been coming up in the news a lot lately. A US Territory, that has been absolutely devastated by Hurricane Maria, but there is more to the country than what we hear in the news. My school has a large Puerto Rican population and so I wanted to share and celebrate their rich and diverse…

Radio & Sound: An Interactive Science Unit

You heard it here first, teaching sounds waves can be fun! We spent a full week exploring the properties of waves and vibrations, as well as amplitude and frequency. The unit culminated in two hands-on projects: building a DIY speaker from wire, magnets, and a plastic cup, and Snap Circuits FM Radio kits. However, this hands-on…

The Anniversary of Hip Hop

On August 11, 1973, an 18-year-old, Jamaican-American DJ who went by the name of Kool Herc threw a back-to-school jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. During his set, he decided to do something different, and thus the first iteration of Hip Hop was born. Hip Hop has done exactly what its…

Google Doodle: Oskar Fischinger

Happy 117th birthday to the visionary artist Oskar Fischinger. Oskar was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. In this amazing interactive doodle it lets you not only create music but also art in real-time. It’s…

Musician Reports: An Interdisciplinary Hands-on Research Project

A fantastic month long project that combines local musicians and gen-ed social studies standards in a fun and innovative way. Working with classroom teachers, together we were able to reinforce the material learned in their classes while making it relevant by tying in popular musicians the students loved. Through a detailed step by step process we researched, created,…

Featured in EducationNext.org : Personalized Learning Pacesetters

Harvard’s “Education Next” journal had a wonderful write-up about the pacesetters in personalized learning. The article talks about Summit schools and the platform they use developed by Facebook’s Zuckerberg. My school was lucky enough to mentioned in the article for the work we do, in particular the personalization that takes place in my ukulele class!

We LAVA ukulele!

To get the ukulele basics under our belts, 6th grade learned and performed the easy and adorable tune of “LAVA” We broke the song (and class) into 4 different parts then used three basic chords, and after a day of “in-formances” put it all back together again as a complete song!

MCA Creation Lab: A FREE Field Trip!

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago offers up to 5 free field trips per school per year. I took my middle school music class to one of their creation labs, where students worked directly with one of the museum’s resident artists to hone their creative skills. Here’s my thoughts on the trip and how…

Make Routines Sing! : Using Music in Classroom Management

“Music is the tool to express life – and that makes all the difference” said local Chicago-born Herbie Hancock. If music is a tool then how can you use it to help you in the classroom? There are a lot of tips out there about management, but here are some unique ones that let music do…