Music
This week was mainly focused on taking care of our voices because as teachers we will need to use them a lot and proves extremely difficult if we lose them! As professional “voice users” the care of the voice is essential to the teacher’s career, as they are particularly at risk of developing voice problems. (General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), 2010). We began with practicing a number of vocal warm ups and methods to help control breathing to highlight where in the diaphragm the voice comes from and how to prevent straining it.
We were also made aware that singing a line and having the class sing the next one back is an extremely effective way to bring the attention back to yourself as a teacher and stop the learners from talking. This method saves the strain on your voice from shouting and it also saves time on behaviour management. Learning more singing lines that can be used in the classroom is helpful as I have already seen a few in action on my serial days and how great they are in settling the class. We were then shown the video below to demonstrate that singing is not the only way to use the voice in the classroom, beat boxing and rapping are becoming ever more popular and can definitely be used with the learners to capture their interest and engagement.
