Music For Kiddos Podcast
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How are you feeling about back to school this year?
Throughout the last couple of weeks, I’ve been fortunate to connect with a couple of music educators and music therapists over on Instagram. Most of us feel a mix of emotions, including uncertainty, as we approach the start of a new school year.
In the hopes of bringing some certainty and extending some kind of support, I’m sharing some tactics I use this time of the year and ideas for back to school planning to make sure you have lots of backups as school starts.
I have four important things in mind when it comes to back to school:
1. Establishing routines & your expectations
If you're walking into a brand new school, brand new class, or a brand new group of students, that you have a general idea of your routine. I'm especially talking about group routines which are especially important in groups and a little bit less important in one-to-one depending on the child that you're working with, simply because there's much more flexibility in a one-to-one relationship than in a one-to-twenty-five relationship.
So for groups it’s good to know:
Are you going to have a visual schedule?
How are you going to transition between songs?
Are you going to use the same general format of the songs?
How do you start your classes?
How do you finish your classes?
You can visit this post and this post if you’d like to read about my lesson planning process and how I facilitate early childhood groups.
2. Having a plan for remembering names
Maybe the reason that this is on here is because it is such a struggle for me to remember names. I remember the kids' faces but names are really challenging for me. So over the years I have come up with a couple of tricks to help remember names.
There are a couple of songs that can be very helpful. There's a chant called “Hickety Pickety Bumble Bee”. You ask the child to say their name and then all the kids in the class say their classmate’s name.
I go over the melody and how I facilitate this song on the 30th episode of the Music For Kiddos Podcast.
3. Preparing for the unexpected
This is kind of related to what I talked about on the podcast last week, related to just having a really good arsenal of songs that could work in a lot of different environments.
My songs “Shake-A-My-Egg”, “Move It, Move It”, or the “Yoga Song” are songs that work in a lot of different settings (virtually or in-person).
4. Having an understanding that it's going to take a while
If you are having all new students, if you are suddenly in-person when you were virtual for a while, if it takes many weeks to establish routines and expectations with kids, to learn names, to do all of these different things, etc., just give yourself some grace, because the first few times are likely to be a little bit chaotic. The magic is coming later, after you have done the work. Stick to your guns with those routines and those expectations and you will see it starting to work over time.
I talk more in-depth about all of these strategies on episode 30 of the Music For Kiddos Podcast.
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