Preparing for a whole school year

My main gig right now is that I teach Kindergarten through 8th grade music. It’s general music and we don’t have a whole lot of instruments, but I’ve been preparing my plan for the whole school year.

I like to put some thought and detail into it to both make it more enjoyable for me and more enjoyable for my classes.

One thing I’ve learned from all of this is that it gets so much easier the more you do it. This is going to be my 4th year teaching and I’ve gotten so much faster with planning everything. I have a larger amount of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t and what I enjoy and what my students enjoy. I’ve also known these specific students for the past two years.

But preparing the plan at the beginning of the year is my favorite part of teaching. Creating a curriculum to follow and figuring out a good order to teach certain concepts in. Choosing all of the musical material that will be used throughout the whole school year is the fun part for me.

But when I first did it I didn’t really think of a plan at all. I kind of just winged it and it went about as well as that sounds like it would go. It was horrible.

So I started planning and it helped a lot.

Now I’m much better at seeing the whole year as one year and figuring out what I can get done in that time and how to go about doing it. I’ve tried a number of different ideas and teaching methods and seen what’s worked and what hasn’t and gotten different ideas for the next years.

ISJ