"Yankee Doodle" (Classes 3 and 4)

We continued to do the “Yankee Doodle” lesson with the next 5th grade class, but I invited my mentor, Jen Purdy to come to watch so that I could get some feedback on how it could be improved. Rather than tell me what went wrong and what went well, Jen asked me what I thought of the lesson. I told her that I felt it had gone pretty well: I felt that my objectives were mostly met, and my classroom management was getting better, too. I was also proud of myself for being brave enough during the lesson to identify a time when the students weren’t clapping the beat. Instead of moving on, I identified it and we fixed it.

However, I had noticed in teaching this time that the students struggled when I asked them to improvise their own rhythm towards the end of the lesson. This had also happened in my other lessons, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to it. During this lesson, some students just kept the beat, instead of improvising a rhythm. Others would just go crazy, not really doing any kind of rhythm, just hitting the table.

Jen had noticed this too. I didn’t know how to fix it, but Jen suggested that I give more rhythmic examples to the students before I let them improvise. She also suggested that we could clap some notated rhythms to help give the students some ideas. So when I came back to teach this lesson for a fourth time to the final 5th grade class, I added these slides to my lesson:

During my lesson, we clapped some of these rhythms before I let the class try to improvise their own. I think it helped all of the students to create better rhythms. Of course, there were still some students who could’ve used more help. If I had more time, I would’ve loved to walk around the room to assess their rhythms and perhaps help some of the students who were still struggling. But I think that adding these slides to my lesson did help a lot! I’m grateful to Jen for her suggestion to do so.

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Link to view updated Google Slides

Link to listen to Class 3

Link to listen to Class 4