Let's be honest, sometimes we as music teachers have more opportunities to do cross curricular connections than we think we do.
You're listening to that music podcast with Bryson Tarbet, the curriculum designer and educational consultant behind that music teacher at the elementary music Summit. Each week, Bryson and his guests will dive into the reality of being an elementary music teacher, and how music can truly be transformative in the lives of the students you serve. Show Notes and resources mentioned in this episode can be found at that music teacher.com.
Hello, and welcome back to that music Podcast. I'm really excited to talk today about how we can create cross curricular connections through our performances. I know that when we talk about performances, sometimes we can get really stressed out and really kind of tense up and about thinking of all the crazy things that have to happen. So if you're doing if that's kind of your initial thoughts, if you haven't listened to Episode 117, I highly recommend you listen to that. And he talks about why I don't put on these big super large in depth performances anymore. But even if you have listened to that, I want to talk about how we can take our performances and turn them into opportunities to get outside of the music classroom. I'm going to go through a few reasons why I like to do this. And then I'm going to take you through my all time favorite performance that I've ever put on. And which was full, it's completely 100% across curricular connection, the through and through. So we know that as music teachers, we have that double edged sword of being able to create our entire curriculum from scratch most of the times, which can be great, because we get to do exactly what we want to do, it can be real, not great, because we have to figure it all out on our own. But the reality is this, a lot of our general education teachers, they have kind of prescribed curriculums that they teach from, so they have a lot less flexibility over what to teach when, and sometimes even how. So sometimes it can be tricky for them to create, you know, cross curricular curricular connections into the music classroom. So I like to use cross curricular connections outside of the music classroom, I know that, you know, the standards are talking about how we can, you know, connect it to other other different types of arts. But I think whenever we can bring in any sort of other non music thing, one administrators love that too. It's great for our students, and three, it really helps solidify some other things that are, you know, basically solidify the concepts that our students are working on, both musically and non musically. So how do we do this? Um, my, I think it's my first year teaching or maybe my second year teaching, I don't know, what am I earlier, a couple of years of teaching, I wanted to put on a performance. And I knew that I wanted it to be, I wanted to somehow connect it with what the students were doing in another class. So I went to the second grade teachers, and they said, Hey, we have a performance in April, what will you be teaching around that? You know, do you have any major concepts? You know, what, what kind of things will be going on in your classroom around that time? And at the time, they said, Alright, April, we typically get to the water cycle. And I said, perfect, I can work with the water cycle. So that's exactly what I did. I took the concept of the water cycle, and I ran with it. And honestly, it's been, it turned out to be one of my favorite performances yet. So what I did is I essentially looked in all of my places for a repertoire of the books that I have my focus on collection, best notes, you know, just go to Google or Pinterest, and I tried to find children's songs, ideally, folk songs, that had something to do with water. Because that was the theme. And I found a bajillion because as you can imagine, there are a lot of songs about water, you know, the Itsy Bitsy Spider, that's a lot about water, but a lot less of songs. So what I did then is I looked at my curriculum map, and I said, alright, what are we working on musically, concept concept wise, in the month, you know, the weeks, you know, March, April, what are we kind of working on, and I was thankfully able to find a lot of crossover between the between the concept of the, the watercycle, you know, with repertoire that I found, but also had musical elements. So they were rhythmic elements that I could, I could extract from there, there were melodic elements that I could take out of there. There were things like form or dynamics or that I could also use to help my musical curriculum go even though we're learning a performance.
So what I did is I took all these different songs, something about were about the sun, some more about cloud somewhere about rain, and we essentially created a musical representation of the water cycle. And what I did to bring even more connection is I went to the teacher and said, Hey, any chance you could have the students create writing samples that talk about the different parts of the water cycle? Because likely they're going to be doing that anyway, right? They're going to be writing about what they know what the watercycle is, and kind of how it works. So what we did is we had students create either a poem or just you know, actual just reading
out what the what the difference part of the water cycle is. And then we would sing some songs. So you know, first we have, we have someone talking about rain perfect. So they're going to tell us about how rain precipitation, how that works, all that fun stuff, then we'll sing a few songs that have to do about rain, then we might sing a song that are then we will have students that will talk about evaporation, and they'll read through their, their their writing samples about evaporation, then we're going to read some songs about the sun, right? Maybe that because the sun is going to make the water go hotter, you know, evaporating, things like that. Then we had some students bring up their writing samples, and they read it about condensation. So then we had some songs about clouds and things like that. And then to make it a cycle, we ended again on more writing sample samples for of students describing rain precipitation. And then we re edited with the same song that we started with, showing that it is a complete cycle. And it's kind of a musical musical representation of the water cycle. The students love this, they love to being able to bring what the songs we were working on in music class, when they were talking about the water cycle in their in their science class. They also love being able to talk about the science facts that they learned when we're talking about our musical songs that are about watercycle, or about rain or whatever. In the music class, the connection was great, being able to have them create their own writing samples, they were the students that chose I love students volunteer, the students that chose to read their, their writing samples, they were super proud because they were reading something not the not only were they reading into the microphone, but they were reading something that they wrote. But it was also a I mean, they were writing, right, they were using so many of their other skills other than your musical skills. We also had writing samples for other students kind of displayed in in the cafeteria, while we were doing the performance or, you know, people can look at prior to the performance or after the performance. And it was just a it was very simple. It turned out to be about half an hour, 35 minutes. And it was exactly what I wanted it to be it allowed the students to have the opportunity to perform, have them have a cross curricular connection, and allow them to be able to
perform and use musical concepts other than just doing a performance and having music, the music, we were able to show that music is connected to so many other things. I love cross curricular connections. Honestly, I don't know of many teachers who are against cross curricular connections, some might be against the extra work it might create. But I think it really helps one, it helps solidify us as more than just that music feature. Because it's allowing us to bridge you know, kind of bridge into other curriculums. But it also shows our teachers that we are willing to work with them. Even if sometimes we might have teachers that are hard to work with. Because we aren't necessarily on a team, right? We don't necessarily have a music team that we get to collaborate a lot with. So whenever we're able to collaborate between our shared students, that is going to benefit not only ourselves, but of the students as well. And I think that is a really good cool way to think about cross curricular connections, is we're thinking about how we can better serve the students, rather than how can I work with this teacher? How can I you know, how can I figure this out? We're saying how can we solidify and increase the level of,
of education that our students are receiving? You don't have to make it super complicated. You don't have to make it something that it turns into this huge thing that you do every year. I haven't done that performance yet. Again, I'll do it in a couple of years, once people have kind of graduated through. But I think that we sometimes need to
take a step back and realize that, yes, there are likely some general general education teachers that don't want anything to do with us. But the most of them, the majority of them are just trying to get by just like we are. And they might not think about how we can collaborate. So a lot of times when you give them the opportunity, and it could be as simple as saying, like I like I did, hey, I'm gonna we're gonna have you be having a performance this time of year. Are there any concepts that you'll you'll have just covered or things like that around around that time in your curriculum app. And that one could can show a lot of things it shows that you're willing to work with them, it shows that you're willing to work around them and kind of using you know, rather than making adding more work on them, you're taking some you're just asking questions so that you can still do the work you're not saying alright, we're doing a performance I need you to teach them this or I need you to do this that the other thing you're really saying how can I help you
better serve your students as well. So I know this is kind of a short but sweet episode. But I think that we we need to do what we can to create cross curricular connections just in general. And I really think that performances are one of the easiest ways to to get started. It definitely take
Make some forethought, you can't just boom have a performance that has a cross curricular connection. But there are a lot of ways you know, if you take some time, even just, you know, an hour or so and just really see, what can we come up with? What can we see what sticks and just see ways that you can make those connections. That is where the magic happens. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of that music podcast. Don't forget, we release new episodes every Wednesday, so mark your calendars and tune in for more engaging discussions on elementary music. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please consider leaving a review wherever you're listening to. They really help us that feedback really helps us improve and grow and kind of figure out what we want more of and what we don't want less of. And if you haven't already, I'd like to invite you to join that music teacher community, where you'll get early access to exclusive podcast episodes each month, as well as a ton of other amazing bonuses for shownotes links and more ways to connect, be sure to check out the episode description. Once again, thank you so much for listening, and I'll be sure to see you next week.
