Band concert 3/7/2015

Normal west high school wind ensemble.

After the students entered and got positioned on stage, a lady came out and lead some warm up exercises. These exercises helped the students with intonation by moving by half step up and down the scale.  The students reacted well to these warm ups, even though they were not perfectly in tune with each other. After the warm ups, one of the students stood up in front of the ensemble and tuned the ensemble. After the band was tuned the director came on stage and started the piece. The conductor was very mobile on the podium and did a lot of leaning towards different sections, she also used a lot of right and left hand cues, which the band took very well. The band was very responsive to the conductors and most of them kept very good eye contact on the conductor. Something else that i noticed is that the conductor conducted very leniently and would often stop conducting and just let the band have most of the control of the piece. The students did very well in this kind of position and the result of their music was impressive.

Kinder Choir. 3/2/2015

The class starts off with the children sitting on the ground in a circle. The teacher, without saying anything about starting, hold up a picture and asks the children what the picture is. Then asks them to imitate what the picture would do example. Tree blowing tree in the wind, the children put their hands up and sway them back and forth exhaling and inhaling.  This is used as a warm up exercise to get the children vocal chords and lungs warmed up. She repeats this exercise with different pictures working on different warm up techniques. During these warm up the teacher payed close attention to each student and made sure that they were all participating, if one child was not, she would single him out and made sure he did the exercise.

The next exercise the teachers helper started singing, then when the children stopped making noise and were listening she then explained the musical activity. She then quizzed the children asking them if they remember what she said. A lot of the exercises involved movement interaction along with learning different musical techniques.

The teacher always kept a close eye on all the students and always knew when they were misbehaving. Also if the student did not properly do the exercise the teacher would stop the student and correct him then have the child do it again until he did it correctly. Another thing that the teachers would do is always take time to answer any of the questions that the students would have, weather it would be related to the topic on hand or something else.