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
Let’s Make a Circle!
Two ideas for helping younger students to help establish a circle; includes an extension that adds a rotating circle of students.
Hotaru Koi
Three-part canon made challenging by a one beat interval of entrances. This traditional Japanese song is about a firefly.
iDoceo: iPad app for Classroom Planning and Grading
An app to simplify and organize that includes a calendar, schedule, grade book, and daily planner.
Quarter, Quarter: From Speech to Movement
A chant composed to help intermediate elementary students become comfortable with creative movement. Speech, body percussion, canon, a game, rhythm patterns, and unpitched percussion all lead to collaborative creative movement.
Cooperative Learning Strategies and Orff Schulwerk
Orff Schulwerk activities provide a perfect opportunity to develop sensitive human beings who can collaborate, communicate, think critically and create together. This article shares activities that prepare students for small group work.
Advocating for Music Education
Good advocacy stems from describing and demonstrating the value, impact, and benefits of music education.
Laying a Foundation for Creation: Building a classroom culture conducive to the Schulwerk
Ideas for classroom management, including greetings, seating arrangements, and schedules help new and veteran teachers establish positive class environments.
A Mother Goose Suite
Two songs that may each be sung as a four-part canon or paired in a canonic performance piece.
Interactive Technology in the Music Room
Three interactive whiteboard (IWB) and iPad ideas that can be used to develop the 21st century skills of Critical thinking, Collaboration, Creativity, and Communication.
Bird Songs: Recorder is for the Birds!
Explore using the recorder in traditional and non-traditional ways to improvise and create bird songs. Children’s literature, audio recordings, bird guides (both low-tech and high-tech), movement and recorder exploration lead to a performance of bird songs.
Another Way to Play: Teaching Instrumental Music to Students with Upper Limb Differences
The author discusses ways to adapt a recorder and teaching style to accomodate students with an upper limb anomaly.
Your Best Advocates: Sharing Personal Stories
There is great power in personal stories from those we touch the most. Our best advocates are our students, and by extension, their parents/guardians.