During this week’s session we took part in a drama and music workshop, this week being our first music session. We began by discussing the importance of music education and the benefits that it can have. For me, music is never a subject that I have really loved, although it is a talent and subject that I appreciate the importance of. I was aware of some of the benefits that music education can have however, I did not realise the broad range of skills that music education helps children to learn. For example, music helps our pupils develop their thinking skills through the activation and synchronisation of the neutral brain firing patterns which allows us to increases our brain efficiency and effectiveness (Paul Reeves, 2009). Music education also helps us to become sustained self directed learners (ibid). This highlights the importance of music education. As a future teacher I now realise it is imperative that I provide children with music education.
While in the music workshop we looked at the way in which different music affects our moods as well as the way in which everyone perceives a piece of music and how this can be different. This lesson taught me the important of music and how it can be used to inspire us to think creatively in other mediums such as literacy and art as and how they can apply their creativity skills within other curricular areas (Education Scotland, 2013).
We started by listening to a piece of music while taking notes on how the piece made us feel or any thought we had on it. We then got into group and created a story board based on the music piece we had just listened to. What shocked me the most about this was that every single person in my group had pictured a different story although we all listened to the same music piece.
This has highlighted the importance of allowing children to be creative and the also tied in with the concept of child based learning in room 13. As it allowed children to be creative, decide how they felt about the piece of music and what it made them think of. This task allowed us to be creative and although we all started with the same music we came up with very different stories. This task is something that I would try in a class of my own, as it think it is a great way to get children thinking about music, how it makes them feel while allowing them to develop their creatively and collaborative working skills. However, depending on the stage that I was teaching this lesson to I may have to chose a more appropriate piece of music. As the piece we listened to was seven minutes long this would work for a primary 6 or 7 class but maybe not a primary 2 or 3 class. So in order to make it appropriate to their stage I could chose a shorter piece to base the lesson on.
While in drama this week we took part in different groups micro teaching tasks. After taking part in the other groups micro teaching tasks I found that I preferred teaching to taking part, as I did not feel as confident when performing our drama to the rest of the class. This allowed me to empathise with how some children may feel when asked to perform so this is something I would consider when doing a lesson like this maybe allowing them to perform to a smaller group of people. However, I feel that after taking part and watching the other groups teaching I have picked up some lesson ideas and skill that I would implement in a drama lesson in the future. Especially the group that based their micro teaching task on the movie Inside Out. I feel that this would be a great lesson to help children understand their emotions and those of others. This lesson could potentially tie in nicely with a health and wellbeing lesson. I think that most children would enjoy this lesson as they would be quite familiar with the film. At the end of all three groups micro-teaching tasks they did a quick assessment of how the class felt it went for example using fist to five to see if the class understood what they were trying to teach. This would be something that I would include in my future lesson plans.
Overall, this week in both our drama and music workshops we looked at the ways in which interpret what is being presented. In music this was the way that the music piece made us feel and the story that we created based on the music. While in drama was the way we interpreted the different tasks in the different groups micro-teaching lessons and came up with different drama pieces although we all had the same tasks.
References
Education Scotland (2013) Creativity Across Learning 3-18. [Online] Available:https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/Creativity/CRE1_WhatAreCreativitySkills/Creativity3to18.pdf [Accessed: 10 October 2019].
Paul Reeves (2009) Music Advocacy Presentation. 4.37 mins. [Online] Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1njTXx47vHs [Accessed: 10 October 2019].
