Using PowerPoint When Building Units

We had a Music job-a-like, back in March. One of the teachers from Suzhou brought some really scary resources. Scary as in… so amazing that she suddenly turned into some sort of goddess in my eyes. Each one was a PowerPoint of her entire unit. Title pages. Criteria. Deadlines. YouTube embedded videos. Worksheets. EVERYTHING. I was overwhelming. When I looked at these units, I felt like a first year teacher again. Then, I questioned how we can be working effectively through the creative cycle if the unit is so perfectly planned out. Where is the space for innovation, creativity, and teachable moments? 

Fast-forward to the summer. Sitting in a trailer (caravan) with no internet access, I decided to go through my own units and see if I couldn’t “Power-Point” them (Power-Point has become my verb). It was pretty easy at first because I already had all the resources – I just had to drag them in. It was quick work, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself. However, once I started, I began to notice small problems. Some tweaks were needed to my units. Some lessons needed to be moved around. New activities. I found myself doing almost total overhauls of my tried-and-true units. And then I forgot about them as the summer went on and we began our transition back to China from holidays.

Cue the start of school. My main laptop died, but these Power Points were sitting in the cloud. I grabbed a loaner and opened up… organised, fun units. They are based on the Opus music textbooks. My grade eights are doing film scores at the moment. Before, the unit tended towards being more of a music appreciation unit before diving more into the practical aspects (Criterion A first, then B). However, this teacher from Suzhou advised us to think of each lesson as a workshop, instead of a lesson, and so I decided to put something practical and fun into every lesson. We started off with “The Last Emperor,” which shows how music can set a film within a place and time. Reading (Criterion A). Then I transcribed a pentatonic piece for flute, violin, viola, clarinet, and trumpet and gave it to the kids in the class who could play instruments. Everybody else had either Chinese percussion instruments or G pentatonic xylophones. The class was really engaged and interested. I did a Kahoot quiz afterwards and found that the kids had pulled knowledge out of their performances. E.g. one of the questions asked which scale the film theme was based upon, and the majority knew it was G pentatonic because they had been pulling off their ^4 and ^7 bars every class.  When I said we were moving onto “James Bond,” a loud cheer went up throughout the room. Now, I have the same instrumentalists in a practice room learning the orchestra part and I’ve got the rest of the class learning the melodic motif on guitars. We’ll put them together on Monday. The kids are having fun, and so am I.