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Lesson Plans & Videos
Lesson Plans
Each day of our unit, we explored a different movement of The 3-Minute Nutcracker. Below is a lesson plan for each day, as well as any other materials needed for the lesson.
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Monday: "March"
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Tuesday: "Waltz of the Flowers"
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Wednesday: "Dance of the Reed Flutes"
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Thursday: "Trepak"
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Friday: Review
Videos
Below are video highlights from our exploration of stylistic contrast within The 3-Minute Nutcracker. Context is provided for each video.
Monday: "March"
In this lesson, students describe features of a march, explore how to emulate this style on their instruments, and evaluate themselves and each other on performing in a march style. At the beginning of this lesson, students felt like they already played this movement fairly well; on their reflections after the initial run-through, the majority wrote that "March" went the best. However, I believe students learned a valuable lesson about how picky and detailed we can be, and that music can always be improved.
One of my favorite moments in this video was when a violinist said that a note could be less "violent." I was going to accept the style of the note as it was, but upon her request, we rehearsed it again, and it sounded much more appropriate! I loved being able to act as a facilitator in this lesson and turn over more control to the students. Some seemed apprehensive to share their ideas with the class, but I think that doing activities like this more often might make them more comfortable.
Wednesday: "Dance of the Reed Flutes"
At the beginning of this lesson, students listened to a recording of the movmement and described the sound of the instrument that played the melody (a flute). They used adjectives such as "airy," "breathy," and "light." When this video clip begins, students were indepently exploring how they could produc such a sound on their instruments.
In this lesson, I tried to use a balance between student input and teacher-led direction to produce an appropriate sound and style. I think that we ultimately achieved an approptiate style, but more work is needed to improve other aspects, especially intonation.
Friday: Review
The first part of this clip is from our beginning of class warm-up; the second is later in our rehearsal. In between, my supervising teacher rehearsed another piece with them, and students filled out an end-of-week reflection. On this reflection, students were asked to recall 1-2 aspects of each movement that we had discussed during the week. Then, students shared with the class what they wrote. This portion of the video includes the performance-based review of each movement before we did our end-of-week performance.
If I were to do this lesson again, I would intersperse the verbal reflection with the performance review. For instance, I might ask students to recall aspects of "March," and then have students play these specific things. I think that this would have increased effectiveness and also created a faster pacing.
Please note that I am wearing a Catch Me If You Can t-shirt to support the opening night of the school musical!!