Products for Planning in the Music Room

I hope 2016 is off to a great start for you! I am linking up with Aileen Miracle today to share some of my favorite products for planning in the music room.

1) Ready Set Plan! - A Yearly Planning Guide for the Kodaly Music Teacher

I have blogged about this set and included a free sample here. Having these song lists, yearly plans and concept plans has been a huge help in keeping me organized and on track for the year. I can see what I hope to accomplish each month and continue working towards that goal with the appropriate song literature for each grade and concept they cover.

2) Concept Starter Pack for Grades K-3 by Aileen Miracle

In addition to my own concept plans, I love to peek in and see what other music teachers are doing to get more ideas. Maybe they have a song that wasn't in my folk song collection or a different idea on presenting a concept that is even better than what I had. This set from Aileen has given me some new songs to add to my concept plans for K-3. I also love the layout of her concept plans!

The next two resources are ones I don't have yet, but I am hoping to add to my collection of planning resources soon!

3) Purposeful Pathways

Roger Sams presented at KMEA two years ago and I loved his ideas for adding movement, improvisation, and composition into his lessons. It was a lovely blending of Orff and Kodaly that seemed so musical. I would love to try some of his ideas out with my students.

4) Zin Zin a Violin - Sub Plan by Shelley Tomich

Unfortunately, music teachers have to plan for the event that they might be gone. I've been eyeing this resource because I already have the book and it looks like a great lesson to add to my sub tub or leave next month when I am at KMEA.

If you are wanting to stock up on some great planning resources, Jan. 20-21 is a great time to do so! Teachers Pay Teachers is holding a site wide sale and everything in my store will be 28% off when you enter the promo code START16 at checkout. Start 2016 off on the right foot!

Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo

I wanted to share something that worked for my sub while I had to be out of the classroom yesterday. I was introduced to the book, "Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo" when a family member bought it for my daughter (Find it here on Amazon). She is two and LOVES listening to us read it. Since my husband is a band teacher, she is quite familiar with instruments and can name all of them and has been to many, many concerts between his 5-12 bands and my K-5 programs. 

When I look for things to leave for a sub, I try to find things that a non-music sub can do. Books with recordings have worked really well for my subs and the students seem to really enjoy them while I am away.

I left this book and some extension activities for my K-2 classes yesterday and both the sub and the students really seemed to enjoy the book. It has a CD that narrates the story along with an accompaniment. 

After they finished the book, students talked about concert etiquette. In the story, the boy falls asleep and the animals break out of their cages and take the stage as the musicians. So they talked about staying awake and paying attention when they go to concerts. They also recalled some of the instruments that were played in the book. 2nd graders were able to say what instrument families those belonged to.

Then, each student got a response sheet that asked them to draw (and write for the older ones) their favorite instrument from the concert outside of the zoo.

Click picture to download the file for free.

Here are a few of the finished response sheets:

If you would like to use this mini lesson with your students or leave it for a sub, I have uploaded it for FREE on TpT. If you have my sub survival tub, you already have it!

If you have already used this book with your students before, please let me know if you do anything different with it. If you use this with your class, I would love to hear how it goes!

Make sure to hop over to Aileen's blog and see what other tried and true ideas music teachers are sharing!

2,000 Followers Giveaway

I am truly amazed that there are 2,000+ people out there who like my resources enough to follow me on TpT, so I wanted to have a big celebration for hitting that 2K follower mark!

Celebrate on Facebook: Follow me on Facebook for a flash freebie coming this week!

Celebrate on Teachers Pay Teachers: Check in this week for a surprise one day sale in my TpT store. If you are following on Facebook, you will get a heads up on there too!

Celebrate on my Blog: This giveaway will run starting today through Saturday, Aug. 30th. There are lots of prizes and lots of chances to win!

Enter all of the rafflecopters below for a chance to win each of the following prizes!

- 1 of 2 $50 Teachers Pay Teachers Gift Certificates
a Rafflecopter giveaway

- Your choice of any of my kindergarten lesson plans (#2-8)
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Read more about my lesson planning here.

- My Voice Cards (I'm calling it "Four Voices" because I use four in my classroom - speaking, whisper, calling, and singing, but I have also added shouting, humming, and inner voice posters as well!)
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Make sure you enter each rafflecopter for your chance to win! Good luck and have a great school year!

Yearly Planning for Music Teachers

My first year teaching (during my pre-Kodaly training days) I planned for each day and and no real long term vision for my classes or from year to year. During my Level 2 training, Lisa Simmelink really helped me understand concept and long range or yearly planning. One of our assignments was to map out concepts for the whole year for one grade level.

Every music teacher wants to get their year started off on the right track, reviewing where they left off with each grade level and getting new students caught up to speed.  From there we hope to stay on track progressing through the musical concepts we have planned for that grade level. In addition to that, we are thinking about our music programs and performances and how that all fits in to our yearly calendar and planning.  Having a plan in place helps to guide my planning for the whole year. 

So let's get started with yearly plans. When I do long term planning, I like to start with yearly plans and break it down by month, just looking at concepts. What do I want my students to be practicing by that month? Will I be preparing any new concepts? Will I be presenting a concept? Make sure that you are always working both melodically and rhythmically in every lesson. Go month by month for each grade level deciding about how long you will spend preparing/practicing each concept. Remember to be flexible!

Here is a sample of what my long range planning looks like. This is for kindergarten from August through December. I make different colors for different concepts (pink for Kindergarten concepts, yellow for rhythmic concepts, blue for melodic concepts, and the older grades also include scale and meter). I separate by month across the top and the light shades of each color represent concepts that are in the Practice stage (known concepts), while the darker shades represent the concepts that are being prepared and presented.

Want to see more?

These templates are samples from my planning sets on TPT which includes both yearly plans and song lists by concept for each grade level.

Getting from Yearly Plans to Lesson Plans Once you have the concepts you want to teach for each month and each grade level, make song lists for each grade level. Make a list of all the concepts you included on your Monthly/Yearly plans for that grade level (I’ve started one for you for each grade level, but you may need to adjust it to fit your needs). Under each concept heading make a list of all the songs you plan to use while working on that concept. That way when I are look ahead to my third grade planning in September I can see I want to be practicing re and tiri-tiri and preparing ti-tiri, then I would go to my third grade song list and find a song list for ti-tiri to find songs under that concept to weave my lesson plan together.

Here's a sample of what my first page of my 3rd grade song list looks:

For the little kids I like to have a ton of songs/games/activities in each lesson (probably 7-10) in a 30 minute lesson. For the older kids, I choose less song materials per lesson, but go deeper with the songs. Plus by then, their songs are a bit longer. 

Want a closer look at my "Ready, Set, Plan" yearly planning set? Check out this video:

Do you have different strategies for long term planning? I'd love to hear them in the comments below!