My goal of engaging
with long-term planning was well married to my goal of emphasizing
student creativity this year. In September I chose a number of pieces
that would serve as vehicles for students to improvise, compose, and
perform a “finished product” for xylophone, percussion, body
percussion, dance, recorder, and voice. For 4th through
6th grade, because the material was a bit more rigorous, I
had to adjust my long-term plan to accommodate the time limitation
that 40 minutes per week allowed, scrapping a number of pieces I had
planned on. I simply went with the pace of developing the
aforementioned skills that the students set within the context of one
piece for each of these grade-level clusters. By June, each class had
multiple opportunities to be creative with each of these elements and
to develop the aforementioned skills (as well as a better
understanding of form, structure, and melodic composition) within the
context of just one performance piece. I would have liked to do more
pieces that contained these elements, but time – or my
understanding of how the time could be best used - did not allow for
doing it well. I opted for allowing students to master one piece
rather than moving on before they could really perform it cohesively
as a group. I stuck to my original plan for student skill development
and a standard of performability. Next year, I will be thinking about
how to do this skill development simultaneously with multiple pieces.
