Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Songs for teaching kids

I just have to say that every day that I play music in the classroom, we're all in a better mood and the day goes much more quickly. I realized the power of music for teaching when I had to teach Spanish to my third graders. It was on their report card and we didn't have a Spanish class or materials, so I felt obligated to teach them something meaningful if I was going to grade them on it. Luckily I had taken three years of Spanish in high school. I also taught students who spoke mostly Spanish as a first language when I student taught and in my first two years in second grade.
However, I had a very challenging class that year in third grade - 12 of my 22 students received a special service - from Resource Room with an IEP (4 students) to a 504 for ADHD (2 students) to OT (4 students) to Pt (1 student) to ESL (1 student) to speech (1 student) to basic skills (4 students)... As you could probably tell, some students received multiple services. I didn't include pull outs for gifted and talented or instrumental music in that either! Needless to say, I hustled up and finished my Masters degree in Special Education that year!
So anyway, back to the music....one of my students who had an IEP for a specific learning disability sat there during the Spanish test on colors and stared into space. His mom assured me they had studied, and that he should be okay since they spoke Spanish at home. I had taught the students little strategies, like rosa = red roses and verde = very green and we listened to a song about the colors over and over. It wasn't until I hummed the tune of the song that he started to work very quickly...and ended up scoring 100%!


I'll keep updating my Pinterest with more songs and videos...but for now, here are a few of my favorite cds / song resource pages...do you have any to recommend?

http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com/memory-boosting-mnemonic-songs-for-content-area-learning
The cool thing is you can preview a lot of it before buying...the bad thing is there isn't a cd, so you have to figure out the pacing (they give you the tune and tell you the song it was modeled from) AND you have to sing out loud with the kids! (My old roommate even used some of these for her HS history classes - the kids got a kick out of the presidents song!)
Stuck in my head:
"Noun names person, place or thing
office, doctor, school, or ring
school or ring, place or thing
ohohohoho!"


http://www.songsforteaching.com/index.html