On my last day at Monks Walk we held a big event for 100 children from feeder primary schools. As part of this, they watched a concert in the afternoon and then sang with our choirs and orchestra to finish the day. It was the perfect end to 11 years and I will remember it as one of my favourite days there. But the absolute highlight was that some of my year 9 class performed work they had created in class as part of the concert.
The beginning of today’s music lesson was one of the best starts to a lesson I’ve ever had.
Anyone who has attended a Musical Futures CPD day will have explored the classroom workshopping project, moving from warm-ups to rhythmic improvisation which is then transferred to instruments to create a ‘groove’ from which a large-group composition can be created.
Looking back over my class blog Mrs Gower’s Classes, I realised that over the 4 years since I first started to use it, I managed to create a huge resource full of exemplar work, learning logs, a visual and aural summary of what happened in my classroom and much more! Below are a few tips for using a class blog in music-there are many others!
I wrote this blog following a marking review in school that involved every department in the school submitting work from selected students to be reviewed by panels of staff from different subjects who responded to a set of questions from SLT. Of course when I arrived for my panel session there was a box of exercise books and the questions were clearly geared around what you might expect to find inside these.
Anna Gower 