Montoursville Area High School
Montoursville, PA

At my second student teaching placement, I worked with cooperating teacher Kirstin Gist. I taught Choir, Drama, Sectionals, and Ville Harmonic (a cappella).

I focused on the song I would conduct, Come Alive, as well as Diraiton (especially the French diction) and Let the River Run. In Drama, I taught an Improv unit and I rehearsed and made practice tracks for Ville.

Here’s a rubric I developed for my Improv unit!

Loyalsock Valley Elementary
Montoursville, PA

At the elementary school, I taught nine classes: two each of 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st, and one section of Kindergarten.

For 4th grade, I did a recorder lesson and taught/rehearsed choir music, focusing on On My Way, Constellation, and Wipe Out!

For 2nd and 3rd, I taught lessons on form, starting with pop form, then call & response, and then various forms (AB, ABA, AABA, ABC, etc).

Students then did non-locomotor (bopping, patting legs, clapping) and locomotor movement (moving to the left, right, middle, sitting down) to practice identifying different parts of songs based on whether they were instrumental/vocal, and if the lyrics and/or melody changed.

With Kindergarten and 1st, a unit I lead focused on rhythms (iconic notation and normal notation), also including body percussion and composition. The second was a unit based on a folk song that worked on different voices (whispering, speaking, singing) and an ocean soundscape.

Here’s part of a lesson in the first unit where I introduce traditional notation after preparing quarter and eighth notes with different bugs: snail, worm, ant, and beetle.
This also allows for a cross-curricular connection to syllables!