March is full of celebrations, like Music in Our Schools Month, St. Patrick’s Day, March Madness, and National Reading Month! This makes March ripe with possibilities for celebrating music both in and outside of the classroom! I’m sharing some of my favorite ways to explore all of these celebrations in music class.
Music in Our Schools Month (MIOSM)
MIOSM is hosted by the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) each year in March. The theme for this year’s celebration is United Through Music. It’s the 40th year of celebrating MIOSM. There is lots of great information on NAfME’s website to explore ways to celebrate music in our schools. As a busy music teacher and parent, I try to keep our celebration of MIOSM simple, but meaningful. Here are a few of my favorite ways to celebrate MIOSM.
Family Folk Dance Night
Family Folk Dance Nights are one of my favorite events of the school year. They require very little preparation and a perfect musical activity for the entire family! I wrote a blog post about Family Folk Dance Nights to share how I set them up! You can ready more about it here.
Music At Home Bingo
Music At Home Bingo is an activity I developed during as schools closed during the pandemic. It was a simple idea to keep students engaged and making music at home. Simply print the sheet for each student and send it home. Students can do 5 activities to earn a bingo or do all of the activities! Students who complete a “bingo” earn a certificate in celebration of MIOSM! Click the link to download a FREE copy for your students!
Song Brackets
The idea for Song Brackets comes from my friend, Elizabeth Caldwell. She blogs yearly with ideas on how to celebrate MIOSM, but each year, she shares how she uses Song Brackets to expose her students to a variety of musical styles and genres. It’s an easy activity to set up for your students and provides students’ choice in the music they prefer to listen to.
March Madness
I haven’t always included March Madness activities in my lessons, but the song bracket idea actually sparked the idea for my music classes. The reality is that I have students who LOVE basketball and this is just one more way to connect with them through music. So of course, we start everything off with Song Brackets (see above). You can use children’s favorite folk songs, rock music, party anthems, or world music in your brackets and have students vote for their favorite songs.
I Promise
A few years back, Franklin Willis shared a song that he used alongside LeBron James’ children’s book, I Promise. It’s a positive, uplifting book of affirmations for children. Franklin shares a melody he wrote to sing between each turn of the page and shares how he uses backing tracks and transfers the melody to instruments. You can hear him teach the song here.
Interactive Music Games
I love using interactive music games to get my students audiating and reading music notation. I have two that I use with my students. Music Basketball a game where students hear two rhythm patterns and have to determine whether they are the same or different. This is a great way to develop your students’ pattern vocabulary, draw their awareness to sameness and difference, which sets the foundation for improvisation and creativity later in their musical development. Hoop Madness is a rhythm pattern reading activity where students have to read the rhythm pattern using rhythmic solfege. Give students 2 points for each pattern read correctly and see if they can score 20+ points! Anytime I “gamify” learning, students are all in it to win it!
Trashketball
Trashketball is an activity developed by my friend, Chrissy Hutzel of Hutzel House of Music. It can be used with any game you play in your classroom. I’m pairing it with my Interactive Music Games. When a student identifies a same/different pattern or reads a rhythm pattern correctly, they get a shot to score a basket to make it a 3-point shot. And they can score extra points if they improvise a different pattern than the one they just read. This is such a simple, fun way to boost engagement in these activities! I bought these sets at the Michigan Music Conference at The Music Crew Booth from Chrissy.
What kinds of activities do you like to use during MIOSM or March Madness? Share your favorites below! I’d love to hear from you!
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