Music
Expressive & Creative Arts
Eco-consciousness
Music Technology
Welcome!
This site has four purposes:
To guide the flow of lessons
To share resources and materials with students
To share what's happening in class with parents and families
To share resources and ideas with educators
About
I try to make "teaching" an inaccurate title to describe my professional work with children. As an elementary music educator, I aim to facilitate and empower student-centered and student-directed music/expressive arts making. I often teach in nature's classroom, leaning on the environment as a co-teacher. This helps overcome the issues inherent to teaching a la carte (without a dedicated music classroom in the schools I serve). When we do make music indoors, we primarily work with classroom instruments and browser-based music technologies.
In the spirit of co-teaching, I also rely on Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication and Lerman's Critical Response Process to foster a humane classroom environment while scaffolding students' abilities to voice their thoughts in cooperative creativity. In the menu above are two pages I've created for my students to focus creative music periods and organize an ongoing project-based learning initiative creatively sounding bird populations in the present, along with their projected changes by 2050. I will share updates as the school year unfolds!
Eco-consciousness
Two third-grade students at Donovan elementary school note the sounds they hear in the Blue Hills Reservation, categorizing them as biophonic (sounds from living creatures) or geophonic (sounds from the Earth and Earth's systems).
Therapeutic Musicking
Three Summer Discovery Zone students explore sounds on a vintage classroom keyboard. Rather than focusing on refining compositions or playing correct notes, they are exploring, expressing, and collaboratively creating.
Join our community!
You can help support us by contributing to our DonorsChoose projects. Your donation will go towards purchasing the equipment, basic supplies, and experiences needed to facilitate expressive, creative, therapeutic, cross-curricular music-making and intermodal arts processes.
Each project is carefully designed to only include the most necessary requests, in order to reduce the carbon footprint of the manufacturing and shipping needed to fulfill the order.
