Blog 5- 8th October 2019

Music is an important Expressive Arts subject as it influences the mind and the body. Music matters to pupils as it allows them to express feelings they cannot say aloud for example. Music creates more colour in the classroom as pupils are desperate to take part in music lessons and bring their imaginations to life through the use of musical instruments.

Music benefits pupils as they develop various skills as well as the ones they learn through music. These can be things such as teamwork by co-operating with others when using instruments and confidence to play aloud. It also opens up many new opportunities for pupils such as joining a band or starting lessons on a specific instrument within school (Barrett et al, 2019).

We interpreted our emotions into our music workshop today. By listening to various songs we were asked to note down the different emotions we were feeling when listening to the music. For example, here are some related pieces of music that show the feelings we felt during this activity.

Canon in D represented a calm and relaxing emotion.

Summer created a very excited emotion as if we were at a party.

This activity highlighted that music allows pupils to feel different emotions and feelings and every pupil will have different opinions on different types of music.

We had another activity to listen to a piece of music and create a story line from it. Our group chose to have our character to be chased by a bee as the music got faster at certain bits therefore this was representing our character running away from the bee. We used a story board to show our final product of our ideas in regards to the music we were listening to.

This activity would be a great lesson to do with pupils as it tested our creativity by allowing us to make our own story based on what we were hearing in the music. The activity would require pupils to work together to use all their ideas and express their thoughts on other people’s work ( Iversen et al, 2015). My only advice is that if you are going to use this activity with pupils is to allow them to have more squares than 8 to develop there story as the piece of music was quite long and we felt we could have developed our storyboard better.

At drama, we linked back to the micro-teaching however this week we were just participating in other groups presentations. One particular groups presentation I liked was based on the movie “Inside Out”. Which highlights the importance of our emotions in our and how we chose to deal with them. This group worked really well together to ensure their presentation was fun and engaging for pupils as they kept it relevant to things pupils would enjoy( Van’t Hault, 2012).

This activity also linked in with our new drama convention.

  • Role in the wall –  Which you draw an outline of a body. Inside of the body represents the characters feelings and the outside represents others feelings.

This links with Inside Out as teachers are able to teach their pupils about mental health and emotions or feelings with pupils in a fun and engaging way, where they don’t actually realise they are learning about emotions.

Overall, from today’s session I have gained knowledge on the importance of music and why it should be encouraged within education. Music allows pupils to develop as an individual by gaining various skills such as confidence from being able to take part in music when they maybe haven’t before. As I progress through teaching, I was definitely ensure that music is encouraged within my teaching to further develop my pupils as individuals.

 

REFERENCES

Barrett, M.S. Flynn, L.M. Brown, J.E and Welch, G.F. (2019)Beliefs and Values About Music in Early Childhood Education and Care: Perspectives From Practitioners.  Journal of Front Psychol [Abstract, Online] Vol. 10. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492529/ [Accessed: 8th October 2019].

Iversen, A.M. Pederson, A.S. Krogh, L and Jensen, A.A. (2015) Learning, Leading and Letting go of Control: Learner-Led Approaches in Education. Journal of Sage Open. [Abstract, Online] Vol.5(4), pg. 1-11. Available: https://journals.sagepub.com/dor/pdf/10.1177/2158244015608423 [Accessed: 8th October 2019].

Van’t Hault, J. (2012) Kids Drawing- How to Encourage Creativity, Skills and Confidence [Online] Available: https://artfulparent.com/how-to-encourage-drawing-skills-confidence-creativity-in-young-children/ [Accessed: 8th October 2019]

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