Welcome to St. Monica Music!

Hello all! Welcome to the blog for the St. Monica Music classroom. This is my first year at St. Monica and I’ve discovered and fallen in love with the family atmosphere that St. Monica School embodies. In order to maintain that atmosphere within my classroom, I’ve tried to make our learning experience as transparent as possible – I want parents to know what their child is learning, for the school to appreciate the art the children enjoy, and for the kids to sense the achievement that comes with sharing art. I’ve already started a Twitter page for our classroom and an Instagram page – I’ll be honest, the Twitter is often neglected, but the Instagram is usually up to date. On these pages you can see rhythmic compositions the classes have created, videos of the Pre-K and K singing songs that they’ve mastered, clips of our classroom routine (such as our “If You’re Ready for the Hall” exit song!), and much more.

The rest of this year will be documented appropriately on here, but let me give you a quick recap of our first semester in music:

• Students are actively practicing echo-singing and Solfege patterns, and all students grades 1-8 performed in the Christmas program.
• Students learn to count and play rhythmic patterns through instruments (our favorites currently are the tubano drums and the Boomwhackers), ostinato patterns, and regular practice with Ta/Ti-Ti patterns.
• Our General Music Middle School class is small this year, and we’ve gotten to dig into a bit of music history, do a compare/contrast project on musical soundtracks, learn to use the GarageBand app as a means of composition, and most recently, created a “Mickey-Mousing” project where students wrote new music to accompany a cartoon. We’re just beginning a keyboarding unit to give the students a basic overview of piano technique and history, and from there we’ll do a unit on rhythm and drums.
• We had 6 students from our MS Choir attend Indiana State School Music Association (ISSMA) Solo and Ensemble contest in January and February, performing vocal solos, piano solos, and a violin solo. ALL of the students who participated received a gold medal for their performance and excellent scores from the judges. How amazing is that?!?

I look forward to sharing with you in more detail what the children have been working on recently and what they’re learning as we continue forward. Music is meant to be shared!