Pennsylvania Common Core and General Music.

There has been a lot of emphasis placed on all teachers, not just the classroom teachers, about the new Pennsylvania Common Core standards.  As a "specials" teacher these new standards do not directly effect my classes, meaning they new standards are not written out "xyz" on how to use them in my type of classroom setting.  However, it is still expected that we try to incorporate as many of these standards into our teaching as possible.

In order to do this I have been reading the standards and then try to figure out a way I can change my lessons to meet those standards.  A big emphasis that we have been going over with the entire elementary school is the emphasis on writing.  In my class we have journals that 4-6 write in every day, however their writing is more copying then using creativity to write a story.  This year we tried a brand new project to help the students creatively write, while listening to Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird". In this writing assignment I was looking for creative writing, correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of words.

In this project the students listen to an 8 minute portion of the Firebird (The "Infernal Dance") and from only listening to the music they had to come up with a story of what they thought the ballet was about.  As a fun added twist they worked as a class, each person was in charge of writing one sentence to add to our story.  At the end we read all of the sentences together to see what we thought as a group the Firebird was about.

 After their story was finished I read the real story by Stravinsky. Then as a class we used the ven diagram technique to compare and contrast our story with Stravinsky's.  Following is what the final project looked like.  These are examples from Mrs. Lyon's 5th grade class.