Never in a million years did I think I was actually going to enjoy teaching recorder. But thankfully, something big changed my first year of teaching. Welcome back to that music Podcast. Today I am going to share what might be one of the biggest changes that I had really early in my career. So I just stopped talking. Hello, and welcome back to that music Podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing one of the biggest revelations that I had very early on in my career, that really changed the way I view the recorder. Let's be honest, you either love it or hate it. Rarely is there an in between of the recorder. And I'm gonna be here saying i If you don't teach recorder, that's totally okay. I'm not over here saying if you don't teach recorder, you're bad teacher. But what I will say is I see so much value in the recorder, I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And then we're going to go about what I thought recording would be in my classroom, and then the switch that happened that made me realize that it can be so much more. So first of all, I really love the recorder for a lot of reasons. One, they are incredibly affordable. And also the the fact that I'm able to give every single one of my students a recorder that they get to keep forever is a big deal for me. I you know, I think that music is so accessible in so many ways. But oftentimes there's a financial barrier, you know, a guitar is a couple 100 bucks, you know, to have, and especially with the students that I teach, you know, they will likely a lot of them likely don't have any instruments at home. But what I love about it is, especially with my administration is you know, if students aren't able to buy a recorder, we buy one for them. So everybody gets recorded, they get to choose the color, they get that you know, it is there's forever. And that is like by far like the the biggest reason why I like it because they get to have it forever. And they get to have ownership on what what their instrument is. But there are also so many wonderful musical and non musical skills that come with learning the recorder first, perseverance, like let's be honest, the recorder is not an easy thing to learn. There's a lot of different skills that are layered on top of each other. But the biggest reason that I have loved seeing it is it puts everyone on, you know, everyone is starting from scratch. Some of the students that have really flourished the most with recorder are students that in fourth grade our lowest readers. And what I love about this is that I see them realize that nobody knows how to do this yet. You know, especially when you're in fourth grade, and you can't really read very well, you've been spending years not knowing that you read at a lower level than everyone else. You've spent years knowing that everyone else seems to get it before you do. And for the first time, everyone is on the level playing field. The students that I've seen flourish, the most of the recorder are those that take that understanding of we're all learning this. And they use that as a catalyst to really dive in deep. So let's talk a little bit about what I thought recorder was, and then go into what recorder can be. So I had experienced recorder a couple different ways in my field placements and student teaching. But they were more most more or less what I would kind of refer to as like a beginning band mindset. And again, this is not me throwing shade at beginning band, I promise. But essentially, we stopped doing the general music stuff, we would get out chairs and music stands and we would play recorder, we would go from one page to the next. And that was kind of it. And I really did not enjoy it. Part of it is I didn't know at the time, but I do now you know I have sensory processing disorder so and I didn't have earplugs so that wasn't a thing that I really learned until later. But that's a whole other bag of worms. But I also just felt like that wasn't the most engaging thing. It felt it felt weird to stop doing the really high engagement stuff that we've been doing and and kind of move into this different mindset. So that really didn't sit well with me when I went into teaching recorder for the first time. I just felt like there had to be a better way. I didn't really know I didn't really go out looking for it. I just I knew that there had to be something better out there. Thankfully. I believe it was David Rao that first introduced me to the AOS a the American Orff schulwerk Association's video library. So if you're a member of a OSA at the national level, you get access to essentially a bunch of recordings from their national conferences for like a long tight. There's a lot of videos there. And I found a recording of someone leading a workshop on the recorder. And I loved it. I felt like everything that I didn't, I couldn't have found it if I wanted to. I couldn't, I wouldn't have known what to Google, I wouldn't have known how to you know what to how to put it into words. But once I saw it, I was like, yes, that is what I want. This is highly engaging. This is the recorder. It is it's not. It's amusing the recorder as another tool, another form of musicality, rather than this is now recorded time, it's more of, hey, we are going to explore all the same stuff that we've been doing with music and we're singing in with dancing. And with movement, we're just going to use the recorder as a tool. And that completely blew my mind. It was so cool to be able to say oh, we can still play games, except instead of playing singing games, we're going to have the recorders. So we're going to have the kids doing G and E. And we're playing a game like that. And the whole point of the game is for them to practice using both hands and going from GE, but they're doing it in a game. That blew my mind, because that's how I teach everything else. So why would I change the way that I taught the recorder to not acknowledge that and the way that I saw it where it could you could just layer on these skills, live it ever so slightly layer them on top of each other and do it so in a creative way that is allowing the kids to explore what musicality looks like on a recorder on that instrument, rather than their voice or on an on a percussion instrument. It just really resonated with me with how easy it was, but also with how engaging it was.
With that being said, I still made mistakes. The reality is is my first year of teaching, I was making it up as I went. I was I had a lot of great resources on the AOS a website that I was using and emulating from I have to say my favorite my favorite concert that I've ever done was probably my first year teaching record or concert. But you know it really I don't know where I'm going with this. Let me get one of those little what do they call clickers, clickers breaker marker
so what does it look like to do recorder quote unquote, the orc way. And I'll be the first to tell you that I do not have any formal worth training, I have just emulated a lot of what I've seen of how the recorder is added into a music setting. And the way that I've done it after taking in kind of different influences. But a lot of it coming from that AOC video library is I use the recorder in the place of our voices. And I kind of echo I kind of emulate my beginning recorder curriculum. So I traditionally sex is now a bit of greener somebody
once I started looking at the recorder as kind of like, alright, this is a new voice rather than this is an instrument. That's when things got really easy for me. So in my classroom, I teach solo me first. But I know there are a lot of people that teach me radiofirst With that being said, I also know that if I were to teach older beginners, I would do me radiofirst Because of the song repertoire that's out there. So guess what I teach first on recorder for my upper elementary kiddos me radio big and the reason I do this is one it's easy 112123 But there's also a lot of of repertoire that they know that has me re endo now I know there are a lot of people that also will do the G and the E the sole me or you know somehow doing a solo me on the recorder first. I like big I've tried it both ways. I actually did a one year where I did one class one way and one the other just to see which one I like better. I don't recommend doing that. But I stuck with me right though just because of the repertoire that's out there. And being able to allow the kids to use any of the games that we had done essentially, that involves singing, but you replace it with the recorder. So we might do a game where somebody closes their eyes and I hide something and instead of saying instead of singing, I have the bone or whatever I'm making something up apparently, they would play B A G, and they would point to where they heard the sound. Or they will try to figure out you know, which which person made the mistake or which person played the poison note, all these different activities, all these different games, all these different ways of singing that we've, we've learned over the years, applying that to the recorder was such a simple transition, because it didn't have to be a complete gearshift, but we're just using it in a different way. It's kind of like when you're driving a car, and you cross the Canadian border from the United States and Canada, where am I going with this whole bear with me. So you know, your car is always going to go the same speed. But when you're in Canada, you're going to know, you need to know how many kilometers per hour you're going. And when you're in the United States, you're gonna need to know how many miles per hour, it's still the same speed, we're just measuring it in a different way. And it's kind of the same way with the recorder and our voice. I know, this is a little bit of a convoluted metaphor, but I'm gonna roll with it because I like it. But essentially, we're just using things in the different way. But it's still using the same different instruments, the same different games, the same activities that the students are used to. So that way, the only new thing is the recorder. We're not doing a new song and the recorder and the fingering and reading on the staff and all these things all at once that are brand new at the same time, we're slowly scaffolding, scaffolding them up to add a new thing. With that being said, I do not have my kids read off the staff. First, I have my kids play first. Because as you have probably figured out, I am very much so code I based. And I believe, as code ated that we should do sound before symbol, we should get the kids from the known to the unknown. So the known is here's what we can do. We have a song, we can play it. Now let's figure it out how we can write that. Now I'm not saying I don't teach the staff we've been doing staff for years. But I don't teach when I first introduced the recorder, I introduce it without any any notation, it just echoing doing that rote stuff that we do. And then eventually we start scaffolding it in adding work making it more and more and more difficult. But we're doing it in a way that is understanding of where the kids are. So while this might not be the most Orpheus way to do recorder, I hope that you've been able to, you know, if you're if you feel like they're like like I did, that there just has to be a better way for the recorder. I hope this has helped you gain some new ideas, or at least see it through a different lens. Because I truly believe that the record is one of the coolest things that we teach. I think that a lot of the reason why teachers hate it and kids sometimes hate it and parents sometimes hate it is that we don't really know what to do a lot of the time and we're kind of making it up. And it doesn't isn't necessarily tracking. So there's just a lot of room to grow.
So my challenge to you is this, if you are one of those people who are really anti recorder, I would challenge you to give it another shot. I would challenge you to at least think through what it would look like to shift the way you do the recorder to be more closely aligned to what is happening in the rest of the classroom and the rest of the year. If you are someone who does do recordings, try something new. If you're an aos, a member will go into the video library. There's a ridiculous amount of recorder stuff, look at the different activities, the different composition to get things the games and try one of those things and see what happens. If you're one of those people that kind of do the sit and play thing with a recorder. Get them up and moving have them moving around the room have them show them a lot of contour with their bodies as they play it whatever it might look loosey goosey it might be an absolute mess. But give it a shot, try something new, and let the kids play and explore music in a way that just happens to be through a recorder
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