In one of my previous posts about neuropsychology, I mentioned attending a workshop with the wonderful Robyn Stavely in which she demonstrated the power of teaching through non-verbal gesture by teaching us a whole dance without speaking a word. The dance involved the use of dancing scarves , which were manipulated in a variety of ways to show phrasing, dynamic variation, form and beat and was set to this interpretation of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" The actions were as follows

Presenting taa & ti-ti as the first rhythmic concepts students will add to their growing vocabulary is an important step, and is a lesson I always look forward to giving. In order to present taa & ti-ti to your students, they need to have a couple of things down-pat first: 1. They must be able to perform a number of folk songs which contain these rhythms and they must be able to do them accurately without the help of a teacher. 2. They have to be able to keep the beat in

Rhythmic dictation can sometimes feel like a necessary evil in the music curriculum. Students can feel under pressure in test-like conditions, there is a need for silence in order to complete the activity, it can feel at times like the un-fun but necessary part of music education. Well, it doesn't have to be like this. Rhythmic dictation has become one of my favourite things to teach once I made one simple discovery: there are more ways to write down a rhythm than just using

As the school year has wrapped up and the craziness of report-writing season has died down, I am left thinking about assessment and the constant juggling act we teachers seem to perform between our own needs to assess our students' learning, the needs of our school/district/state system to implement its own assessment guidelines and the needs of our students to be engaged and enjoy their music lessons. As such, I am always on the lookout for assessment tasks that double as a