6-8 Middle School |

A&GC: Week 2 – Bursting Stereotypes

Part blog post, part field notes. This post is part of a series of reflections on a 10-week elective I’m both teaching and conducting active research on. Entitled” The Arts as a Path to Global Citizenship” our goal is to explore our roles as global citizens using the arts to approach complicated and difficult topics, such…

A&GC: Week 1 – If the World Were a Village

Note-Cards: A Musical Matching Game

Have your cake and eat it too, with this fun and educational card game. Players will be exposed to & learn about various notes, rest, clefs, and other musical symbols. Based on the classic line of Crazy 8’s (UNO) card games, this version has slightly altered (yet intuitive) rules that reflect the nature of the…

FREE: Materials from Arts Education Conference

Thanks to CPS Arts & Ingenuity for putting this amazing conference together! I enjoyed it not only as a presenter but as an attendee as well. In the spirit of the event’s theme “Collaborating for Quality” I wanted to share all the resources I discussed in my presentation, making them available to download and use. The…

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…

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…

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…

21st Century Music – Guest Speaker

Grammy Nominated Producer, Bryan Wilson, took some time out of his busy schedule to speak to my class of eager 7th & 8th graders. He talked about what it means to be a producer, all the hats he has to wear, and how important communication and collaboration are to his job every day.

A New Curriculum for a New Century

Who thinks they are musical and who thinks they could be musical? These are questions that grace the entrance tickets my students take at the start our ten-week 21st Century Music Elective. The results are always the same. Very few consider themselves musical and even fewer think they could develop that ability….