In todays lecture we were focussing on why music matters. Through this we were encouraged to consider our own musical experiences, how we can participate with music, how we discover music, our musical awareness and the power of music. All of these things have strong links in the curriculum relating to the experiences and outcomes. It was good to think about these things and reflect on how music is a powerful thing in each of our lives. This would be important for children to consider to realise why music matters and allow them to be more interested in it as a subject and become fully engaged.

Music

Today we were fortunate to have children from the Greenmill Primary School string project visiting us. The children displayed their talent by playing us one of their musical pieces. They then went on to show us some of the musical games they often play. We then had the chance to sit with some of the pupils as they taught us about their musical instruments. The pupil i was with played the violin, she described to me what the different parts of the violin were called and what there purpose was, she showed me how to correctly hold the violin and gave me the opportunity to give it a go myself.

Being taught by the children was good as it gave us the opportunity to see how much they have learned and how passionate they are about music. It was amazing to see how being part of the orchestra had brought to many benefits to these children due to being part of a team they were all very polite, well behaved and friendly and truly did show the impact music can have.

It was insightful to see this type of thing happening in schools and show us what we could help to initiate in our own schools in the future.

Drama

Today we continued on with the story of the dragon focussing on hot seating and improvisation considering how these conventions would would in the classroom.

Our lecturer then read us the first part of the story entitled ‘The Tunnel’. From this we participated in one of the drama conventions ‘role on the wall’ whereby you draw a character from the story. On the inside of the character you write the feelings that they would have and on the outside, the feelings you would have. We then heard the rest of the story and reflected on our previous feelings which had completely changed.

We then split into groups and chose a scene from the story to portray through narration. This was useful as it showed the different ways to teach drama through the one book.