This November, instead of inviting my parents to see their third graders to a performance, I invited their families to join us for a family folk dance night. It was quite a wild journey, and I can't wait to tell you all about it.
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started, I want to let you know that today's episode is brought to you by the steady beat Survival Guide. In this free ebook, I share my top 20 favorite songs and chants for steady beat in the elementary music classroom. To grab your free copy, head on over to that music teacher.com/steady beat. Again, it's that music teacher.com/steady beat. You can also check out the show notes wherever you're listening to this episode now. Welcome back to this week's episode of that music podcast. And this is a going to be a really actionable kind of reflection on my past performance where I had my third graders do a folk dance night where we invited their families to join us, for most for a few of the things, instead of our traditional performance in November. I'll be honest, this is something that I wanted to do pretty much since I've started teaching, but it's taken me a few years to get the courage, well, to be a little bit more precise, I finally got the courage, and then covid happened, so I thought maybe doing a folk dance night, if the surge of the pandemic, was probably not a great idea. So we ended up doing this here, and it was an absolute blast. There are definitely some things that I would change about it, but I'm definitely going to be moving this on in future years, kind of as a little bit of a tradition with my third grade class. So let's dive in and talk a little bit about my performances. So my third grade performance is always in, like, late November, early December, usually like the week we get back from Thanksgiving. And I have been doing a lot of movement activities with these kids since things started getting a little bit less crazy after covid, and we've been doing a lot of, like, folk dances. Even during covid, we were doing a lot of, like, socially distant folks dances and things like that, just because that's what I love to do, and that's what the kids really were responding to. So we've been doing a lot of that. So for the performance, we did six different things. We did los michetes, Papa patch, old brass wagon, taidio, Rocky Mountain and Sasha. So those that was the whole performance. I my performances are usually kind of short and sweet, but this was a lot of fun. So we started out the performance with all basically we did in the gym, and we put all of the chairs just outside the wall, like lying in the perimeter of the wall. I will say, in my school, we have kind of smaller classes, actually. We have two large classes, but we have about 28 kids in each class. So if you have a larger school, you might have to do some something a little different. But that worked for my my school and my population. So we walked in with Los machetes, all the students, the students each had their rhythm stakes, and we worked through the folk end. And I was just hanging out in the corner. I wasn't helping them. They knew what to do. They were following the forum. I just hit play and watched them do their thing. And then after that, we moved into Paw Paw patch, which is a play party. So I basically gave them their pitch, and we had the students run through the Play party. I got this from the handy play party book. It's a wonderful resource if you want to do more movements and play parties. And they went through that, and they kind of showed it. We talked a little bit about what a play party was, and then that was kind of the two first things that just the students did. After that, we grabbed some hand sanitizer. I had hand sanitizer stations kind of spread out throughout the gym, and we came into the center to do old brass wagon. And for this one, I invited Any brave family members to come join us from the audience and join us. And I had so many join us. I was worried that nobody was gonna come up and it was gonna be a super awkward thing, but these kids were like peer pressuring their parents in the best of ways, and I loved it. We had so many people that we had, we almost ran out of room. We almost had to make a second circle. And we just have them do a simple thing. They grab hands and they circle to the left. Dull brass wagon, circle to the left, old brass wagon, circle to the left, old brass wagon. Y'all were the one, my darling, and I was just acting as the caller. I'm not doing anything for this. I'm just letting the kids show their parents, show their grown ups, how this works. So I would call out a circle to the left, or a circle to the right, or up and down, or stand and sing, or whatever. I tried in and out a couple times. It was a little crazy, so we didn't do that. But basically, the kids got to show their parents how we did this song, and they were singing. They some of the parents even started singing in because it's kind of simple, you know, once we repeated it, and the kids. Loved it, watching the kids have so much pride, and just like being able to serve as leaders to their grownups and to their little siblings, their older siblings, like some of the kids that I had when they were in school, are now in like, high school, and they were like, there. And I was like, Haha, I love it. I finally got you guys to do this, and it was a lot of fun. Next up, we did tydeo. I did not have the grown ups do this one. We just had the students do it. The concentric circles. They were singing and showing it, and then we bring the grown ups back up for Rocky Mountain. The Rocky Mountain that I use, I honestly think, is completely made up. I'm not sure this is written down anywhere, but it's basically two parallel lines and they're walking forward and backward. I think this is something that I invented, or one of my friends showed me during covid To make them spread out. But I'm here for it. And basically we, I, we were instructed the the parents how to do it. We broke we, I kind of took them through the teaching process of all right, we're going to talk through it, all right. Now we're going to talk through the next two, two chunks. All right. Now we're going to try the first two chunks all together. All right. Now we're just kind of taken in through that process. So they were able to understand a little bit about what, you know, kind of what the learning process was. And we went through that a few times. The students were able to sing it. The parents started joining in. It was wonderful. Again. We had a wonderfully long, long way set that we almost had to leave the gym because we are so many, it was great. And then we ended up with Sasha, which is a wonderful preacher from the New England, Dance Dance masters, books with music as well. And that was the whole thing. It was super short and sweet, but there was so much packed into that. And I think that the honestly, I don't think we could have done it much longer, because we were literally up and moving the whole time. So I wouldn't have wanted to move much longer than we were thinking back on the performance and kind of the days and weeks leading up to the performance. There are definitely some things that I would change, but it comes down to it. This is coming back next year, having a family folk dance night, I think is a lot of fun, and I think it's a great way to show that music class isn't what they think it is, necessarily. And honestly, in the future, I'll probably have them do more. I would love to maybe do a square dancing night or something like that, where it's not just it's more of doing than watching, because that's what music is, and that's what the type of music that happens in my classroom is more exploring and doing rather than sitting and watching and listening. But I would definitely think that moving forward having, okay, I'm just, I'm not even gonna sugarcoat it, some of the rehearsals in the gym with the combined classes were absolute chaos, and part of that is because I the first time we actually did it together. We had no subs, and the PE teacher was out, so I just took both classes alone. We survived. But I wouldn't recommend doing that. I would recommend having some extra people there, even if it's just for, like, crowd control, but also making sure, I think I me as a teacher, I need to put in a break in, like halfway through, because, like, we did a 40 minute class practice, and doing folk dances for 40 minutes is a lot, so we started getting a little bit of behavior stuff going on towards the end of the practices. Thankfully, they were amazing during the show, but it was kind of frustrating in the moment, especially when trying to get the kids to not scream like banshees during Sasha as they're finding a new partner. But we, we pulled it all together, and I right now we so we sometimes get really stuck in performance mode, and I'll be honest and to say that I am very blessed that my administrators in my community, they support more or less what I've been doing for performances. But I fully aware that there are some situations that you're gonna have to take tiny, tiny, tiny steps over many years to get to this point. But I think that the type of music making and music exploring and music engagement that was happening. And this event was well far beyond just my third graders. We had preschoolers up there, we had high schoolers up there, we had grandparents up there that were doing these things with us and that were do I mean, that's the whole point of these folk dances. That's the whole point of these play parties. They're not to be performed, they're to be played, they're to be done, they're to be shared, and to be part of this communal music making experience. And that is what draw drew me to this originally, and what really has made it
such a special event. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I left, I left the event sweaty and gross, but it my heart was so full, because not only did we able to get all the mix make all this music, but my students were able to serve as the leaders to show their grown ups what they were learning in school. You can't get a better demonstration of what is going on your classroom than turn. Your students into the teachers. So I'd love to know if you have any questions about how I did my folk dance night, please send me an email Hello at that music teacher.com. Or send me a DM at that music teacher. I really love going into this as I'm as I'm recording this episode. I have a feeling there might be a another podcast episode coming out soon about how to actually get your kids to do folk dances and play parties without worrying about the cooties, because that is definitely a an entire episode right there. But I really hope you reach out and if you learn nothing else, even if you don't do a folk dance night, I would love to challenge you to try something new. Go outside of your comfort zone. Try something that puts you kind of on the background and lets the kids really take control for performance, which I know is really scary, but it can turn out really, really awesome when you when you support the students in a way that you know that they have everything they need. So you getting up there and standing in front of them is not going to help. Not going to help them. It's just going to get in the way. So if you enjoyed this episode, I would love if you were to share it with your music teacher, bestie, if you are so inclined to be extra awesome, if you could leave a review on iTunes that would make me my music teacher. Heart super helpful, just super happy. It makes me understand, you know, kind of what episodes you guys are looking, looking for, what you want more of. And as always, if you have any suggestions over future topics, send me an email [email protected] or you can message me over on Instagram. I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you so much for making difference in the lives of your students, and I'll see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
