This weeks lecture and seminar focused on the importance of your voice in teaching. As a teacher, one of your most effective tools is your voice so it is therefore important to learn exactly how to use it in order for it to be a useful resource in teaching and communicating. Therefore, this weeks seminar focused on tips and tricks that we could use to help protect our voice and ways to use it to the best of our ability. One tip that I found very interesting and useful was that there is no need to shout in a classroom. Sometimes as a teacher, you forget that shouting to get the children’s attention isn’t always the best approach as its not always effective and can hurt our voice in the process. I think some teachers find this a good way of controlling behavior management but in my past experiences of being on placement in schools and nurseries i found that shouting didn’t ever really get anywhere with the pupils. A better technique I think would be to change the tone of your voice, use facial expressions or even sometimes clapping a rhythm to the pupils for them to clap back can be an extremely effective tool to use in the classroom.
I researched the importance of our voice as teachers and how being expressive with our voice by using different facial expressions. true emotion and our tone of voice when speaking can help the children learn to be expressive as well (School of Educators, 2011). I also learned that using the whisper technique can be extremely effective with young children as it seems to “signal intrigue, mystery, secrets and more”. These techniques are definitely going to be ones that i try whilst on placement and in my future career as a teacher.
We were also told that the General Teaching Council have a whole document outlining the importance of our voice and what to do if we feel like our voice has been effected. I think this is an excellent tool as it gives you lots of advice and information on how to use your voice effectively in a classroom but also what to do and different techniques to use if your voice gets damaged. Its a very useful resource to have whilst on placement and in years to come when we have our own class to teach.
Moving on from this, we looked at how we use our voice through music and how important singing is in a classroom setting. We were shown a resource called Choon Baboon that we can use with the children. This website is a brilliant, new and modern way to get children singing. There is a variety of songs available on YouTube with backing tracks and lyrics to help teach the children. It is a fantastic, fun resource to help build not only the children’s self esteem, confidence and expression but also the teachers. This is definetly a resource I would use as I lack a lot of confidence in teaching music and this tool would be a huge help in my development.
We also looked at a technique called Graphic Scores which is a visual tool that makes reading music a lot easier. It is created with boxes, along the side you have that sounds that have to be used and along the bottom is the time frame. We got split into groups, our group of 6 created a graphic score focusing on Christmas using a variety of instruments.
Overall, this seminar was very fun, interesting and informative. I learned a lot of different techniques of how to manage my voice in teaching as well as fantastic resources to help teach singing in the classroom. I feel a lot more confident about teaching music after seeing some of the tools out there to help.
After this seminar, we had our drama workshop. We were following on from last week’s class where we were looking at different drama techniques that we can explore and use in the classroom. This week we focused on four particular conventions varying from flash forward, flash back, narration and slow motion. My favorite convention was the flash forward scene as it allows your group to be creative and create your own ending for the story. This week’s story was based on a haunted house which was very relevant as it was coming Halloween. It was a very fun and creative idea as because the story was quite vague it allowed for each group to have their own individual idea. For flash forward scenes, we had to create what was happening after the present situation and flash back was the opposite that involved showing what happened before the present situation. As a group, we decided to make our flash back scene from centuries ago and it was very different and enjoyable to create. For, slow motion we returned to the present where we were entering the haunted house to see what it was all about. We also got to create a scene were we used narration which was when someone in the group would describe what was happening in the scene.
From taking part in a seminar like this, it highlighted for me the importance of using a story that children don’ know what happens so that when they are creating the scene the children are able to be creative and use their imagination to create a different story from another group.
References:
School of Educators, (2011). How to use your voice as an effective teaching tool. [Online] [Available: http://schoolofeducators.com/2011/07/teacher-tips-how-to-use-your-voice-as-an-effective-teaching-tool/] [Accessed: 3rd November 2017]
Choon Baboon, (2017) Choon Baboon. [Online] [Available: http://choonbaboon.com/] [Accessed: 3rd November 2017]
