Advice needed for a primary teacher!

Hello musicians! It's been a while since I last posted a message here, but it's the first place that I thought of right away to ask for some wise advice.

I've been offered a position as a music teacher in a Primary School (I live in Argentina) to take care of forms from 1st to 5th. While from 1st to 3rd form we will only be singing and doing recreative stuff, in 4th and 5th I shall be teaching sight reading, so that they already handle that to start playing in a school band in 6th. These kids later on will sit for IGCSE Music and IB Music. This will be my first time teaching a group of people!! Since I know that we have some school teachers in the forum, and most of the young ones (not to say all of you) have been through music in Primary school (elementary or whatever you call it), I would like to have some suggestions!!

What shall I teach? What should I expect? Any cool ideas for anything?

Everything is welcome!!! Thanks a lot guys.

That's a good question!

I don't have much(any) experience working with very young kids...I'd start SUPER basic though.

Probably most important:

Rhythms. Simple quarter notes at first: clapping or with drums or something...bang bang rest bang.

...other than that, I dunno.

Well that's something thanks a lot! Kids like making noise don't they? :D Percussion with easy rhythms sounds good.

I guess I will come up with more specific questions as I start teaching.

Thanks again Rob! More suggestions are still welcome. I'm going to roam around the forum and see if I can help someone as well, hehe. :dry:

regards!

Well that's something thanks a lot! Kids like making noise don't they? :dry: Percussion with easy rhythms sounds good.

I guess I will come up with more specific questions as I start teaching.

Thanks again Rob! More suggestions are still welcome. I'm going to roam around the forum and see if I can help someone as well, hehe. :wub:

regards!

I recommend ear defenders. And a taser :D

lol

Can I borrow your lightsaber??

just kidding! :D

Primary kids should be ok, it's secondary age kids that make me want to commit mass murder :dry: :D

Music bingo :toothygrin:

My school used to have bingo cards with different music symbols on them. It helped us learn to read music. There were like 4 different levels of cards, ranging from simple rhythms (the teacher would clap a rhythm and the students would have to find it on their card) to notation etc.

Music bingo :w00t:

My school used to have bingo cards with different music symbols on them. It helped us learn to read music. There were like 4 different levels of cards, ranging from simple rhythms (the teacher would clap a rhythm and the students would have to find it on their card) to notation etc.

That's awesome!!! Things like that really make a difference!! I'm loving it.

And it's a good starting point to develop more ideas, to learn by playing games. From here I'll see where my train of thought takes me.

Thanks a lot!

Maybe you could teach them lines (EGBDF) and spaces (FACE) or, if you're teaching them both G-clef and F-clef EGBDFACE.

This encourages reading by lines and spaces and discourages reading by calculating, which is slow and seems to be quite intuitive for many beginners.

I have taught this (informally) to three people. 8 and 10 years old got it, but the 16 year old didn't get it...

Rhythm first for sure.. Kids love clapping and jumping about.

Hello, What I do is clap for them while they play, then actually play each part for them (in the piano for me). then for the drums, I play that for them on the drums. After the clapping is done, I play a recording with a metronome. After that I Just play the piece alone. Then I conduct them while they play. MY BAND IS THE BEST!!!!!!!...How is your band?....THE BEST!!!!! also?

Oh, yeah and rhythms also while they play.

I have taught a number of the younger grades. My first question is how many kids are in a class? Next is how long are the classes? Lastly, How often do you meet per week? These are the first criteria to know to come up with a lesson plan. Also, will you have a helper in the classes?

If you're going to be teaching elementary school students music literacy with a focus on singing, I recommend learning the Kodaly method of music education. See if you can find someone near you who teaches music, and maybe they'll know someone nearby who can teach it to you, or give you a book on the subject. I taught elementary school for years, and learning Kodaly was the best thing I ever did.

Otherwise, just teach them everything you know, and learn more as fast as you can! Traditional singing games, simple dances, and folk music are a particularly good way for young children to learn about music. Whatever instruments you can find, etc.

Thank you very much to all of you!! I'm sorry that I haven't been in the forum for I while so I didn't answer, but everything was very helpful.

We don't have a band, we only play the recorder and they start with band in 6th form with another teacher. I have 4th and 5th twice a week in 40 minute periods, and the rest -1st to 3rd- only once a week, in 40 minute periods as well. The number of children goes from 20 to 30, depending on the class.

What I do basically is teaching them songs that we sing during class time, and then teaching some musical theory and sight reading with the recorder. We start really easy, only a couple of notes no more than that, and it starts to get harder as the years go by. The idea is to have in 6th form kids that can do first sight reading with easy stuff, rather than studying hard pieces by memory.. they will have time for that.

We are going to learn a couple of "hard" songs with every group, so practising them measure by measure. We are in winter break right now, and I'm planning to do some music bingo with them, great idea.

I'm going to check out the Kodaly training.

Thank you guys!!! More suggestions are still very welcome! :happy:

Well, when I was in elementary school, the teacher used to have us do all sorts of stuff like we would play a game around halloween where the teacher and all of the class (exceot for 1 person) would hide this little skeleton and the one person in the class would go find it while the rest of the class had to sing a song (I forget what song it was) and the singing would get louder the closer you were and softer the further away you were. I remember another thing we did (in 4th grade) was the teacher would show us a video on all of the different musical instruments and she would have some kids from the band and orchestra classes in middle school bring over their instruments and show us what they looked like and what they sounded like. I thought that was neat. We also played games and had a musical at the end of the year.