Strategy 7: Post-it Notes

This strategy is a great way to help struggling readers figure out the problem areas in their reading abilities.  While the book suggests using it as a way of having students to mark in their textbooks, I see this concept in a more broad term as applying even to short reading passages.  I think students should have to mark in the passages they are reading the areas where they are having difficulty.  Once students are able to realize where they have difficulty reading and what is causing their problems then they will be able to seek out help from an appropriate source.

Strategy 6: Think Aloud

The think aloud strategy would help my students to parse through difficult texts filled with music related jargon.  I do not imagine that my students would get the opportunity to read many fiction texts in my class, so I find many of the reading strategies would not work in my classroom.  Think aloud would help me to assess my students' understanding of the texts while we are reading them in class and would help me to identify students who were struggling.  Thus this reading strategy would be a great way to help gauge critical reading abilities.

Text 7: A Blessing of Music

Poltarnees, Welleran. A Blessing of Music. Seattle, WA: Laughing Elephant, 2003.

This is a picture book that describes what makes music so special.  It contains various historic pictures of music making from the 19th century, and thus can be related to history.  It is engaging and inspiring, reminding the reader of what makes music such a universal language and what makes it so awe inspiring.

This book is a very easy read, and thus would be a very good assignment for struggling readers.  English Language Learners would also benefit from this book by being able to see the pictures in the book.  I would not have the entire class read this book but I would rather assign it to individual students and have them read it as homework.

Text 6: Amadeus

Amadeus. Dir. Milos Forman. Perf. F Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge. Orion., 1984. DVD.

Amadeus is a movie that follows the live of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  It more specifically explores the relationship between Mozart and Antonio Scalieri.  It is known that Mozart had a very challenging relationship with the Austrian Court, but this film dramaticizes that relationship.  It includes depictions of the monetary challenges that Mozart faced as he tried to make a living off of composing alone.

This movie would serve to help the students to relate to Mozart.  Too often the composers that students study about are only just names, but a film such as this would help to humanize Mozart such that the students would understand him.  It would illustrate the time period in which many composers worked for the common practice period, and would help students to understand the role that composers played in society.

Strategy 5: Rereading

Rereading would involve having the students read the article they had been working on over again so that they could get a better understanding of what they read.  Most articles that I would have my students read would be of the professional nature so students would have to read most of the articles again to develop a good comprehension.  Reading would not be very common in my classroom due to the performance driven nature of the music classroom, but when I would use in class reading in my lesson plans rereading would aid the students considerably in improving their reading comprehension.

Strategy 4: Ocassional Paper

An Ocassional paper is using a paper about things that happen in students' lives apart from school that is not graded on grammar or mechanics.  This  would be very appropriate for a homework assignment to get students thinking more openly about music.  I could give this assignment to students getting them to use it to think more critically about the music in their lives.  The students then could read their papers to the class and the entire class would gain more insight into how music affects the lives of others.  This would then be a great way to engage students of diverse cultures in class and a way to validate the musical tastes of all students.

Text 5: Die Moldau

Die Moldau is a programmatic tone poem from the late 19th century by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana.  This work is one of the first works by czech composers trying to establish a czech musical identity.  Smetana paints a picture of the moldau river as it flows from just being a small tributary to where it meets the ocean.  He includes such cultural themes such as a wedding dance and mythical stories of a magic forest inhabited by fairies.

This is a wonderful example of the programmatic tone poems that were so popular during the 19th century.  It helps the students to realize that even thought the music does not have words that it can still provoke images.  I would also use this to teach students the nationalist function that a lot of music served in the 19th century.

Smetana, Bedrich. Die Moldau. Perf. Norrington, Roger. 1996.