This week in Mr. Weil’s class I was able to teach 5th grade, diving further into the Standard of Excellence book. We started on #23 and worked our way through a few numbers after that. Take a quick look at my lesson plan and video before you begin further on into this reflection.

Weil 5th grade 10-17

*Due to the safety and privacy of previous students, all photographs and video recordings have been graciously taken down as of August 4th, 2015. Please contact the creator personally to grant access if desired to view independently.*

Title of Video: Student Teaching w/ Weil 5th grade (10/17)

As you can tell, I have began using a new, systematic approach to teaching, known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. It has definitely been a struggle for me to use this sort of approach in teaching and especially in lesson planning, but it is definitely helping me become a better teacher as a whole. In this approach, I’m using higher-level thinking words such as create, demonstrate, compare and contrast, identify, devise and other such words to better help my students in their learning experience.

To continue on, there were a few main objective in this lesson to get the ball rolling again after having not seen these kiddos in nearly 2 and a half weeks (due to Fall Break). These objectives were revolved around learning common time, fermata’s, and being able to differentiate between performing as a soloist, as a section (soli), and all together as a band (tutti). As you can tell at the very beginning of the video, we flew by the first few lines in the book that we started off with, giving us more time to work on #27, which introduced solo, soli and tutti. On #27, we were able to compare and contrast what these three words meant, and we were also able to look at different examples as to how to play the soli section. If you look back in my lesson plan, you’ll notice how I state two example of having a whole section in the band play the soli part or having a small group of students play the soli part such as having 2 saxophones, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets and 2 trumpets. During our time working on #27, I was able to have the students perform multiple examples of the soli part, just like previously stated, and they had a blast! One thing that I almost forgot to mention while teaching the solo part in all three of my lessons was explaining to the students how to give the proper respect to the soloist, as if they were a soloist themselves. Laughing and making rude comments and remarks was definitely not accepted. I told them that they needed to treat whoever was playing the solo part the way they would like to be treated as a soloist. Overall, the lesson was the perfect way to start school after such a long Fall Break!