This great post on Byrdseed Gifted, a fabulous resource for higher level thinking ideas, inspired me to come up with more ways to get music into my own classroom. To extend one of Ian’s ideas even further, I would like to use music to communicate some of my expectations. Students seem to forget, sometimes, what they should do when they finish their work. What if the background music answered this question? If I am playing Bach, for example, could this be the signal that they are supposed to check over their work, and then read a book? Or, could Beethoven mean that they can find another partner who is finished and do a center activity? Of course, this would mean the students would also have to be able to identify the pieces of music – an added bonus! Now that our school district subscribes to Soundzabound, I should have plenty of resources for creating a more harmonic classroom environment.
