Management in the Music Room

So management is likely the most important part of my teaching day. If I do not have rituals and routines in place, no matter how great the kids are, there’s going to be chaos.

Over the past few years I have implemented the Whole Brain Teaching structure into my Music Room. Now I have not adapted ALL of their strategies but I have integrated the basics.

5 CLASS RULES: these pretty much cover EVERYTHING!

CLASS-YES: I sing all my “class”s and the kids echo back with “yes”.

TEACH-OKAY: Each student has a predetermined teaching partner who sits right next to him/her. We use this to re-teach (repeat) quick directions, short important points and the 3peat.

3PEAT: During the music history portion of the lesson, I create a 3peat: one sentence that captures an important fact about the composer, ie.  Bach wrote fancy rounds called fugues. This 3peat is spoken to the teaching partner 3 times.

SCOREBOARD: OH YEAH-OH NO (Mighty Groan) is basically a tally sheet. I have one I made for my Smartboard. The kids score a tally (Oh Yeah!) for doing something great and I score a tally (Oh No!) when they make poor choices. The object is to have more Oh Yeah’s than Oh No’s. These tallies are used to earn a few minutes of a highly desirable activity at the end of class. We are currently LOVING www.incredibox.com [Check out the Freebies on this site.]