Student Teacher: Elizabeth Axler

Placement: Mifflinburg Elementary

Corresponding Teacher: Ms. Kelsey Hurst

Lesson Three Analysis

For this final lesson, I added an introduction activity that would boost engagement, since I saw a
dip in student engagement in the beginning of the last two classes. I saw that this was a great
way to get students engaged and moving before the leaf path vocal exploration.
I can see in the video that this final time of doing the leaf vocal exploration, students were more
confident with going low to high and high to low. Like last lesson, I kept track of which students
volunteered on the class seating chart sheet to make sure students who didn’t go last class had
a turn.
With “Wise Old Owl”, students learned how to sing with their solo head voice, as well as be
respectful when other students are getting solos. For example, you can see a few times in the
video where students did a funny voice or a weird speaking voice for their solo, when I knew
they could produce a nice singing voice from my experiences in hearing them last class. So, you
can see me say “I’ll come back to you” and have the next person sing, and then come back to
the student. This was a classroom management strategy that was not included in my lesson
plan that I had to add on the spot.
Next, students reviewed “Autumn Leaves”, and I noticed this this review students were not as
eager to recall the song (maybe because they had sang it a bunch), so I added the stimulus of a
“challenge”, so that students were more motivated to sing. This was not in my lesson plan but
worked wonders to get them to sing.
For the performance of Xylophones, scarves, and singing “Autumn Leaves”, students learned
informally how to behave when giving a performance, as well as how to appropriately use the
instruments. With this performance, I used a rubric I created evaluating students' use of the Orff
instruments to demonstrate understanding of high vs. low notes/ sounds, as well as
appropriately using Orff instruments. With this, I was able to quickly put a number next to each
student on the seating chart for me to later compile into my listings/ tracking of students. Now,
looking back, I would have created that Orff rubric from the start, as I had started out with a
rubric evaluating student understanding and performance of Orff, Scarves, and Singing Autumn
Leaves. I realized two things with this larger rubric. One: I was unable to evaluate all of these
things at the same time for each individual student, while trying to manage and correct
behaviors and performance of orff and scarves. Secondly, it did not make sense for me to
evaluate all of those things when I had not been tracking student performance of scarves and
singing in the previous lessons. Therefore, this is why I stuck with the Orff rubric only.
As a closing activity, students learned how to keep the steady beat while repeating back
rhythms with their voice (rhythm multitasking). This was a bit challenging for Kindergarten, as
some students only had the repeated rhythm in their voice and feet, while the rest of the
students were able to multitask.