I'm Back! Music In Our Schools Month!!!

Ok... so maybe starting up a blog during my 1st year of teaching was a bit too adventurous... now that I am over halfway through my 2nd year (WOW!!!), I think I'm ready to roll my sleeves up and get to sharing some ideas again!  So... what better way to start than with Music In Our Schools Month!  This is my first year celebrating Music In Our Schools Month at my school. Last year, it kind of snuck up on me and I didn't get a chance to come up with something fun.  So, it was my goal this year to search all over Pinterest and other music blogs to start generating some ideas, since I had no idea where to start.  Thanks to The Journey of an Elementary Music Teacher blog, I had a great example to work from and off I went!  This blogger used the phrase "Music means ____________ to me" and asked her students and the staff at her school to fill in that sentence and created a fun display using wordle (an online website that generates some REALLY AWESOME word clouds).  The great part about wordle is that is can take any amount of text and it makes the words that appear more frequently larger than the other words.  Oh and even better?  IT IS FREE!  It. Is. Awesome!!!  

So... here is what I did.  I changed the original sentence to "Music is _____________ to me".  I wanted this to be a quick and fun activity so I chose to do a classroom brainstorm session.  So, for about 5-10 minutes in each class, I asked students to fill in this sentence and I wrote down their words on chart paper so they could see the words they came up with (if you have a projector, I would highly recommend sitting at your computer and typing their ideas into a word document as they brainstorm, it makes the process much faster... I unfortunately do not have a projector otherwise I would have done that).  I also placed multiple copies of this sheet in the teacher workroom for teachers to fill out and place in my mailbox:

After I had everyone's responses, I typed everything into a word document, separating them by grade level.  Then I copy and pasted each grade level into wordle, picked my color palette and font, and saved each wordle as a PDF.  Last, but not least, I used the poster maker at my school to print out each grade level wordle so that they were nice and big for everyone to see.  And... VOILA!  

One more way that we are celebrating Music In Our Schools Month is having a music style for each week of March.  Every morning on the announcements my wonderful Principal plays a short clip of whatever music style is selected for that week.  And at the beginning of each week myself, or the other music teacher at my school, introduces that music style to the students.  Week 1 was Jazz, Week 2 was Folk, and Week 3 (starting tomorrow if we don't have a snow day!) will be Classical, and Week 4 will be Pop.  I plan on asking different students what pop music they are listening to these days so that they hear music that they recognize during that week : )

Happy Music In Our Schools Month!

How are YOU celebrating Music In Our Schools Month?