First Week Back

The first week back ended pretty well I felt. I worked really hard this week, made up several worksheets and worked on the VCE classwork. The timetable changed on the first day back, so I unexpectedly has a VCE class on monday when I thought I had until thursday to get prepared. Lucky I had the worksheets on my computer ready to go.

The hardest class, management wise, is by far the OzRock classes. I have two classes of 25, and the last two days I had the first prac classes. I have about 4 new students in each class, and I am just too busy to catch up with each student properly. I couldn't get around the whole class today. Also I didn't have enough equipment for everyone to play. This is why the class sizes should be smaller, so that I can fit them all in the space. I don't have the brain space to be on top of everything, especially when I am making sure that the students understand the things I am explaining to them. I just feel overwhelmed. I am pretty happy with the behaviour of the students though. There are a few students that didn't do much today, (mainly because I didn't have time to get them started on a song, or find out what they would like to learn...) but the majority worked out what they wanted to be looking at and now I just have to fine tune the materials over the weekend so that I am better prepared for next week. Its a funny class that way, that because I want the students to have a lot of imput into the songs that they want to learn during class time I can't really prepare that much before hand. During the theory sessions at the start of the week when I put a page out for them to write songs on I got nothing, I didn't find out about song preferences until they were into the prac time at the end of the week. I have a lot to think about before I get this prac thing to work how I want it to.

Things that I am planning towards is using Guitar Pro so that they can listen and watch the tabs as they scroll past. It's like a guitarists version of Sebelius.
I would like to also have clips of people, or even myself, playing songs so that they can listen and watch songs being played and discussed and demonstrated.
Also I need to have a folder with the songs on one of the computers so that students can listen to what they are learning so that they know how it goes. Thats one of the things about TAB, you need to have great listening skills because there isn't much information included, just a number.
I'm hoping to learn about creating flash games so that I can have interactive activities that score students based on rhythm and pitch. Make it a challenge to get a perfect score and have it on a projector so that the whole class can be involved. I tried it with one of my year 7 classes where I had an aural training site up and they had to name the note. Need to allow more time for it, but I think it was successful. Certainly made them think about it, and got them out of their seats.

Anyway, I'm having fun thinking about different things for classes, and continually adding to the collection of teaching materials.