Rocking Out in the Classroom

Katie at Rock and Teach put together this awesome giveaway to celebrate reaching 1500 Instagram followers and her new blog design. There are some great products that you can win for FREE along with a $50 gift card for Amazon.

Everyone participating was asked to write about something we do in our classroom that is rocking so I decided to continue on with the music theme for my post because it is a huge part of my classroom.

I love music and there are so many benefits to incorporating it into the classroom. I think that it allows students to get up and move, while having fun and learning. WIN WIN for everyone involved.

Here is a personal example of how I see the benefits of teaching with music at home. My daughter just turned two in January. We are always playing educational CDs from my classroom when I was teaching. It has been amazing to watch how quickly she picks them up. The first time she sang the alphabet song with all of the sounds I about died. It made my teacher heart so happy. We will be driving somewhere in the car and she will see the letter ‘A’ on a truck and say “A apple a a a”. It is because of the songs we listen to that she is able to make this association at such a young age. Teaching with music works, folks!

When I was teaching I used songs all day long. Some were from a CD while others were more chants. We started our morning with a good morning song. There are so many different good morning songs. I had several, but my two personal favorites were from Dr. Jean and Jack Hartmann. I would rotate songs out randomly throughout the month so that way they did not get bored with the same song.

We always started circle time in the morning with a song and would typically do one after each Daily Five rotation before we sat down on the carpet before our mini lesson.  The song would change as students mastered the material. For example, at the beginning of the year, we listen to this alphabet song every single day after the first rotation. When the majority of my students know the alphabet and the letter sounds, I would go onto a different song focusing on a different topic. We also used them in math, which was great! We also used songs during transitions. These were usually ones that we would just sing as a class. Click {here} for a great link that has many of the songs (chants) that we would do during transitions.

I made a PowerPoint to go along with several of the songs. These are great because they give students a visual to go along with what they are singing. I made them match the song so all you had to do was sync your music with the PowerPoint and press ‘play slide show’ and the computer would do the rest of the work for you. It would play the song and change slides as the song progressed. The kids LOVED it and it was a fun way to be teaching the material. I also feel that it was very helpful for my struggling students and my English Language Learners.

In honor of Teacher Appreciation week, one of my favorite PowerPoint sing-a-longs that I made is now FREE. Head on over to my TeachersPay Teachers store and get the Phoner-cise Sing-Along PowerPoint for free. It was one of my students’ favorite and I hope that you and your students will enjoy it just as much.

To read about some of the benefits of having classrooms with music, click {here} and {here}.

Now for the good stuff and why you are really here. :) Here is a chance for you to win one of my favorite products, Phoneme Segmentation Activities, along with several other amazing products.

 

Simply complete the Rafflecopter below and then hop around visit the other teacher's blogs that are participating.

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

An InLinkz Link-up