I am so very excited to say that our 3rd grade program is going to be a truly integrated partnership between music, art and PE. We are going to present music and art work from around the world and students will all get to demonstrate their skills as singers, dancers, instrumentalists and artists. It feels like a rather huge undertaking, but I am so very excited about the program, I think it’s going to be fantastic and hopefully it will become a model for programs in the future.
One of the challenges that we have as we look toward this new type of “informance” is practical instrument management. My students love to play instruments but this year because of our 3rd grade program we are working out better procedures and set-up, put away practices for our instruments.
We are going to have an entire lesson dedicated to teaching 1st-5th grade how to set-up and put away the instruments. To that end I’ve had to make some decisions about how and where I want my instruments to live when both when they are in use and when they are not.
Here are some pictures of how I have things set up. If you like my instrument labels you are welcome to download them HERE
For each instrument that I labeled I posted a numbered picture on the wall. I hope that by labeling and numbering the instruments I can enable my students to both learn the proper names of the instruments AND put them up well before they can properly read them.
I plan on reinforcing the procedures over the next few weeks whenever we have an opportunity to play instruments. My hope is that by teaching everyone the procedure really well I can cut down on lost time due to set up AND reduce the risk of instrument mishaps.
