Music in the Classroom

    



    Happy Wednesday! I hope you all are having a great week so far! This week at school was the first step to prepare for going hybrid in the beginning of November. This past Tuesday, all the teachers in my building were required to come back to school and teach virtually from our classrooms. Starting on November 5th, our students will come back to start a hybrid model at school. Students also have the option to remain completely virtual as well. I am excited for this change, but it is going to be incredibly difficult to teach in person and virtually at the same time, as well as meet all my students’ special education minutes during the 3 hours that they will be in the building. What a crazy time! One positive thing about this week is seeing my colleagues in person again. Since I am new to the school, I have also gotten the chance to meet other teachers that I had only seen over google meet which has been really nice.

     Like I said in my previous blog post, I want these posts to be informative for educators and to help them learn new ideas that will help benefit their students, including ELLs. One article from my google alerts that stood out to me was about “ensuring progress and knowledge retention among ESL students.” The first part of the article mentioned how incorporating music into a lesson plan for ELLs can be very beneficial. I personally love incorporating music as much as possible into the classroom. I have a very musical background so music has always been entertaining and important to me. Currently, I always try to incorporate songs into my classroom to help my elementary students learn content. They are engaging for my students and also help them retain information. I will use many videos from YouTube to find songs that relate to the content I am teaching. I frequently use songs from YouTube to teach sight words. I also use an online resource called "Songs for Teaching" that have multiple songs to help teach content for many subjects. In the article I read, it mentioned how learning to play the ukulele enhanced ELLs knowledge. Having weekly music sessions helped with learning math, reading, and English. The article also mentioned that learning how to play the ukulele was very calming and engaging for the students and how it was a much more exciting way for them to connect with learning English. Incorporating music also helped the ELLs retain information easily. Continuing to incorporate music into my classroom is something I am very passionate about and I am excited to use it more to enhance ELLs knowledge. I am excited to continue finding more online resources to incorporate music into my classroom. Thank you for reading!






 

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