Today Mrs. C had a brainstorm during chorus class! Sometimes our best teaching ideas come in the moment.
While working on a new sight singing excerpt, where students use Solfege (Do Re Mi...etc) to decode new musical notes, I had an a-ha! moment. The excerpt was moving upwards by step and then downwards and students were forgetting to switch directions.
Then I had the idea to have students move by stepping forward and backwards to match the notes they were decoding. So if a note stayed the same, they would step in place. If the note moved by step up the scale, they would take a step forward. If it moved down the scale by step, they moved backwards.
Students quickly caught on to the new method, and I saw an improvement in their understanding of the direction of the melody.
And taking a few more steps in our day and moving in anyway possible is always a good thing.
A ha!!
Mrs. C