Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

It is that time of year again when you are probably preparing for Parents’ Night or Back-to-School-Night. If you have to prepare a presentation to the parents, or if you have to prepare your classroom for parents to walk through, here are some music tech ideas (an one additional idea) that could assist you with your preparation:

1. Take pictures of your students periodically throughout the day and have them displayed as a slide show, either with Powerpoint, iPhoto, or other various programs that can display photos easily.
   • Advantages: Parents LOVE to see their children in pictures. I feel that they would rather look at pictures of their children than read literature about my classroom and curriculum or listen to what I have to say.
   • Bonus: If you can add a soundtrack of your students singing songs from class, then the parents are watching photos of their children and hearing their sweet voices.
   • Disadvantages: You need to make sure that all of your students are in the photos. This is not so easy when you have to teach and take photos or many of your students are home sick for numerous days. Though the illnesses cannot be helped, when I need to take pictures when I am teaching, I try to do it during an activity that even my youngest could handle without me: playing instruments or performing a slow movement activity. This way, I can take group pictures as opposed to individual pictures.
2. If you have a DVD of last year’s concert-mine would be the grades K-7 Holiday Concert-then let it play in the room as the parents enter.
3. If your students create music utilizing Sibelius’s Groovy Series, or they use a loop-based program to create music such as TrakAx or GarageBand, then have their creations playing in the classroom. For example, if your students created songs in Groovy Music, have the program playing their songs on the computer when the parents enter the room. If they created songs in a loop-based program, have the audio files playing in the room.
4. Do your students study recorder? Record them performing a song with the accompaniment CD track. When my 3rd graders study a song like Queen B by Don Muro from Introducing BAG, they will bring their recorders home and play the song to their parents. This is great, however, without the accompaniment track, the parents do not understand this song that has one note played continuously. Therefore, having the parents come to your room on Parents’ Night lets them listen to their children successfully play a song with an accompaniment and it lets the parents hear what the song truly sounds like.
5. Record your students singing various classroom songs. If your parents are touring your room, or you need to wait a few minutes until all of the parents enter your room, then have them listen to your students singing various classroom songs. Chances are, the  parents have heard them for the past few weeks because the students love your music class so much.
6. When I do have to make a presentation, at one point during the presentation, I will tell the parents where their children will be standing on the risers during the next concert. For example, if I know that grades K-3 will be singing at the next concert, then I will show the parents which riser the grade will be standing on and what part of the stage that riser will be. This helps the parents find a good seat in the gymatorium/auditorium/cafetorium so that they can see their children well. I have found that no matter how much I post the riser order in a flyer or on the website, when I display it during a Parents’ Night talk, the parents remember it well and are so appreciative for the information.

These are just some ideas that I have utilized in my numerous Parents’ Nights. What have you done for your Back-to-School-Night?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 11:07 pm and is filed under You Can Find Me Here:. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.