Singing Lesson Reflection

On Wednesday, October 18th, I taught my singing lesson on the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” We listened briefly to the version of this song with which most people are familiar – the version from 1961 by the Tokens. Then, I taught the class a little bit about the origin of this song. Finally, we learned the melody, a harmony, and then 3 other harmonies. When we were all done with that, we put it all together and had 4-part harmony behind a melody! It was actually really fun for me to teach.

I’ll start with the weaknesses. As always, I say “um” too much. It’s a bit better this time than last though, in part because, overall, I simply do less speaking. Also, I feel that this lesson may have been a bit advanced for 8th grade (as stated on my lesson plan). I suppose this is not a definite statement, though; in Muncie (at least as my experience and that of my peers, has shown me) this would have been way over the kids’ heads. However, I would guess that there is a middle school general music program somewhere (hopefully in a lot of somewhere!) that does this level of singing regularly. That would be awesome.

For strengths, I was quite organized. I am also proud of the sheet music I created with Finale and displayed on Elmo. I felt the lesson was easy to follow (although teaching to college Juniors always helps). Lastly, I was happy with my singing. I realize that I did not provide very many vocal models. Honestly, this was partially an intentional part of the design of my lesson. I am not completely comfortable with singing and modeling (especially in front of all those voice majors!), so I tried to limit what I had to do. However, what I did was decent, at least from my somewhat limited perspective.

Overall, I felt that this lesson went very well. The class responded and sang wonderfully. It was fun, certainly for me as the teacher, but I believe also for the class as students. It was an effective way to get the class singing a piece a lot easier than it may have looked initially. I would consider using this at Delta Middle School, except I am concerned that they have not sung much, if at all. But that is the topic of an entirely separate paper.

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