Music In Our Schools Month: Reflections

During March, students complete a short questionnaire where they respond to a couple of prompts.  I explain that March is Music In Our Schools Month where we get to celebrate all the musical opportunities we have at school and that the questionnaire is a chance to share our thoughts about music.

I type up the responses and include them in the weekly orchestra email and send them to staff and administrators, wishing them all a happy Music In Our Schools Month.  And then, of course, the responses also end up on the bulletin board.  I do these early in the month so students and staff get to enjoy reading them as they walk by the orchestra room for the rest of the month.  Orchestra students like to read what their classmates have written as well as spot their own responses from the lists.

• MIOSM questionnaire prompts (Word document)

• MIOSM questionnaire prompts (PDF)

Another week in March is our tour week where we perform our Solo/Ensemble pieces for a class.  Pictures from those performances get added to the bulletin board, and then the last week of March we get a request day during full orchestra.  The week before, the question of the week is to put in a request for full orchestra so that I have time to organize the requests and figure out the order of pieces to make the best use of our time together.

Check out this post for more bulletin board pictures from MIOSM.

Careers in Music Bulletin Board

With career day coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought I had better put together a bulletin board to highlight some possible careers in music.  When I was in elementary school, the only careers in music that I was aware of were "orchestra teacher" and "member of a symphony orchestra," so I'm hoping this will help other students realize that there are many different ways they could make a career out of music.

I added a few descriptive words or phrases and an image for each of the careers.  Then, for the bulletin board, I took six long pieces of black yarn, tied them in one big knot in the middle, and stapled that to the center of the bulletin board first.  After stapling one corner of each of the different pages to get an idea where each one would end up, I knew where to staple the other end of each piece of yarn (and trim it down), and then I could finish securing the rest of the corners.

• Careers in Music (Word document)

• Careers in Music (PDF)

Feel free to add other musical careers to the list and enjoy!