Wednesday 24 June 2009

The music program in the multi-age classroom

One of the more tricky classroom management issues is the thorny question of "how do I use a program like Music Room with multi-age classes?"

Multi-age classes (or "mixed grade classes" or "composite grade classes") will always be with us and it is a challenge to keep giving the students lessons and activities that they "didn’t do last year".

Our classroom music program, Music Room is currently up to book 5. Eventually (in a couple of years) there will be 7 books. This equates with 1 full year of lessons for each of the primary years.

We decided to number each book, instead of giving them a grade level, because each Australian state has a different system. The beginning year is called variously ‘prep’, ‘kinder’, ‘reception’ etc. Some states have a ‘prep’ year and 6 primary years. Some have 7 years. And so it goes.

Music Room book 1 is designed to work with the first school year – whatever it is called – and the rest of the books follow on. But what if you have a prep/1, a 2/3 and a 4/5/6? How do you juggle the books?

Cheryl Burgemeister, a music/Arts teacher from South Australia, has kindly allowed us to share her system. You may like to post your own solutions on this blog.

You can find Cheryl's system here.

Cheers till next time
Mark Leehy
Publisher - Bushfire press

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