President's Message

Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

Welcome back to a new school year! Hopefully you had a chance to refresh and renew yourself this summer. Your new Elementary/General AMEA executive board met in July to get the ball rolling with plans for our conference in January and our Elementary All-State Choir. If you are new to teaching elementary or general music this year, welcome! Please send me an email at elementaryamea@gmail.com - your board and I would love to help you get plugged in.

Now for something motivational. Initially, I was going to write something about a mad scientist and relate that back to teaching music somehow, but instead decided to go with the Old English rhyme referenced in the title above. 

Each new school year brings changes: some planned, some surprises, and often many that are completely out of our control. There’s no need to belabor the changes that are beyond our control, so let’s talk about a few things we can intentionally implement this year.

Something Old: Perhaps this is a lesson, activity, or song that you haven’t taught in awhile. Maybe it’s a teaching or management strategy that you used once and never tried it again. Or maybe you introduce your students to a piece of music that made history somehow. Do you have an old autoharp tucked away in a closet? Dig it out and play around with it! (Just fyi, it’s going to be out of tune….)

Something New: Register your students for the Elementary All-State choir! Go to a workshop put on by one of the many amazing music teacher organizations in our state. Does your classroom management plan truly serve its intended purpose? Teach a song simply because it’s a fun one. Or maybe you have that bulletin board that needs a quick refresh. “New” doesn’t necessarily mean you have to add something to your plate. For example, pick a day of the week and set an alarm on your phone to remember to leave school at the end of your contract hours that day every week. Or stop checking your school email at home. Protect your time. You can’t pour from an empty cup! 

Something Borrowed: Talk to other music teacher colleagues and see how they introduce quarter notes or what management strategies they use or how they program for their ensembles or what in the world they do with 5th and 6th graders. Our Facebook group is a great place for those discussions! Maybe it’s a book or piece of equipment you literally borrow from someone else. Ask the PE coach if you can borrow a few hula hoops or dodge balls for that one lesson. Maybe you borrow a song or idea from one source and your students put their own spin on it. 

Something Blue: How can you introduce literal color into your music classroom? Is there a collaboration unit with your art teacher or a project with that one class or grade level that just needs that extra “thing”? Maybe musical color could mean experimenting with songs in different tonalities. How often do we sing or play in minor? How about modes? Any atonal music ideas? Perhaps there’s a lesson idea somewhere that focuses on emotions and how they relate to the musicality of a certain piece your students are learning. Is all of our repertoire happy and sun-shiny or do students have opportunities to experience feeling despair, anger, disappointment, love, etc. in an artful way through music? And of course, there are always tons of songs that use 12-bar blues form!

I hope that you have a fantastic school year. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me or your board members if we can ever be of service to you.

Announcements:

• Remember to renew your NAfME/AMEA membership. All memberships expire on June 30th each year. Make sure you are up to date so your students can participate in All-State! Click here to renew.

• Please remember to read your emails! We try to only send info you truly need so your inbox doesn’t explode. If you are not getting emails from elementaryamea@gmail.com, please update this contact form (click here) so we can add you. You may also need to add our address to your contacts. We get tons of undelivered emails every time we send something.

• We have an Elementary AMEA website! Click here to check it out! We will post info about All-State there in the coming months.

• We have new public socials! Add @elementaryamea on Instagram and Facebook. We still have the private Facebook group for questions and discussions, as well.