Reverberations: Teachers Teaching Teachers is a weekly, online publication available to members that publishes models of best practice from Orff Schulwerk classrooms in the form of lesson ideas, student-tested teaching strategies, articles related to classroom applications, and more.
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List of Reverberations Articles
Getting To Know You: Activities To Start the School Year
Favorite, student-tested name games, mixers, children’s literature, a Chinese friendship game, and movement activities to get the academic year off to a creative, interactive start.
Professional Learning Communities For Music Teachers
A music Professional Learning Community provides support for individual music teachers. Share best practices, discuss local resources, create learning materials based on your district’s standards or curriculum, and help each other problem solve.
Grant Writing: What to Ask For? Who to Ask? How to Apply?
In this article, the author shares some suggestions and encouragement for teachers who might want to explore grant funding, including what to ask for, who to ask, and how to apply.
Tech Hacks 2.o: Micro Tools For Your Classroom
Here is a list of helpful bits of tech lined up to slip into your classroom and make things a little better without getting in the way of you doing what you do best: child-centered music education.
Hornpipe: A Lesson In Dynamics
How does a teacher creatively approach music written hundreds of years ago? What activities engage the listener without distracting them from the music they hear? The music will let you know what it wants you to teach. Using the Orff Schulwerk, the author provides a lesson in active listening.
Art As a Movement Map: The Geometric Abstraction of Frank Stella
Using a piece of art from the collection of Frank Stella, connect to and explore visual art in the music classroom. Includes creative movement and technology for truly engaging lesson.
Happiness
A delightful poem by A.A. Milne is transformed into a body percussion canon with additional teaching ideas for the classroom using movement and dramatic props.
Three Orff/Keetman Gems
Three past AOSA presidents share their favorite pieces from the Music for Children volumes and explain what concepts they teach through this primary source material, how they made it accessible for their students, and how they apply the creativity of the Schulwerk to the printed page.
The American Center for Elemental Music and Movement
The American Center for Elemental Music and Movement (ACEMM) was created to provide support for elemental music and movement teachers. ACEMM also provides professional development opportunities for teachers and grants to acquire needed classroom instructional supplies.
A Reason for Rhyme
Three AOSA Teacher Educators share a favorite nursery rhyme and offer ideas for why these traditional texts are a rich source of creative exploration in an Orff Schulwerk classroom.
Wallas’ Model of Creativity and Orff Schulwerk
In his 1926 book, The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas proposed a four-stage process for developing creativity. Wallas’ process can serve as a framework for understanding how to lead students beyond merely learning and performing an existing musical selection to transforming the selection into something new and unique with every group of students.
Making a Case For Quality Material
Good repertoire choices – for both music and literature – can make teaching less stressful and more effective. But what exactly IS good repertoire? Obviously material that children like is a great starting point, but there are several other characteristics that should be taken into consideration when deciding which pieces to teach.