When I attended the National Conference recently, I picked up a great new take on an old favourite from Jai Schelbach. Because it had a bumblebee flavour, I of course instantly fell in love with it! The song can be found in Catch A Song (Kodaly teacher's bible) as "Witchety Jamboree" but in this new version the words are changed to Bumblebee Jamboree. In the game, children mill around the classroom stepping to the beat. All sing along, stopping to listen for the colour that w

One of my ongoing missions as a classroom music teacher is to introduce my students to a wide variety of musical styles and genres. In particular, Art music. I once had a student teacher ask me why I didn't play more pop music in my classes. I answered that it's not my job to show students music they already hear on a daily basis. The Top 40 is everywhere. They hear it in the car on the way to and from school, in advertising, in movies... Art music, however, most of them don'

An important part of any music education should be discovering the wide variety of instruments available to us. These instrumental units are always some of my favourites and the kids always engage with them really well. However, teaching students about these instruments effectively can be challenging unless you are a one-man-band! (I most definitely am not, and whilst I can confidently show my students around the world of brass, especially the ins and outs of a French horn, I

So you've just made conscious taa and ti-ti. Now what? Instead of charging full speed into the next rhythmic discovery, it's important to give your students the chance to put their new knowledge into practice and play around with their newfound rhythmic friend. It's also important for you as a teacher to be able to assess that they have in fact fully understood this new concept. There are 6 broad forms that this practice may take: Performing, Reading, Writing, Composing, Impr

We've all been there - your alarm goes off in the morning and despite going to bed in tip-top shape, suddenly you feel like death. It's the dreaded lurgy and there's no way you're making it into work today. You blindly grope around for your phone to call in sick, but then you realise... once you've made the call you will have to somehow find the superhuman strength to haul yourself out of bed, stagger to your laptop, pull up your timetable and lesson plans for the day, realis