Last Day of Practicum

Today was my last day of practicum. I've been thinking about my whole practicum ever since I got home. It was an absolutely amazing experience. My Associate Teacher was more amazing than I could have ever imagined and I was at an awesome school. I was completely spoiled by both of these. Every time I go on Facebook I read of the problems one or another of my colleagues is having at their school, I didn't have any problems.

In regards to my singing project, I also got a lot out of my practicum. I taught grade two to grade eight music. The grade twos do singing, the grade threes and fours do singing and recorder, and the the fives to eights do band instruments. I saw an awesome overview of the process John (my associate teacher) uses to create the really amazing singing found in the grade fours. Getting students, sitting up straight, using good posture (sitting on the front edge of the chair, with their feet flat on the floor and their backs straight), and singing in their head voices. The hardest part of this is the head voice, a large part of achieving which is the warmup. In addition to the warmup done every day in class (which I intend to post on here, eventually), I copied John's vocal resource binder, which had it's own section just on different vocal warmups, as well as many other awesome resources.

Between the advances I've made in my own singing, and the experience of having taught vocal classes, and all the resources I have, I now have very little anxiety about teaching vocal music. That being said, this project is definitely not done. It will never be done, but realistically it will eventually fall into the background just as all the other musical skills I've worked on have. I don't have time to practice all the instruments I play regularly, this is just a fact of life. But for now, singing is still in the foreground. The better I am as a singer, the better I will be as a music teacher, especially in the junior division where vocal music is almost a guarantee. My focus right now (outside of the approximately 50 pages of assignments I have to write in the next three weeks), is to start accomplishing some of the goals I laid down in my initial blog post.

Thanks for reading,
Trevor

The Purpose of the Exercise

The whole exercise of becoming a better singer was for purpose of being a better music teacher. I haven't had a lot of time to sit down and work on singing lately. Well not in the way I envisioned this process taking place. I've been in my practicum. But, the whole practicum experience is definitely helping me a lot. Obviously for teaching, but also in my singing journey. I've been doing singing with about half of the classes I teach and it's really helping my singing out. Especially the head voice. My tone, tuning, range and head voice have all improved immensely from using them teaching classes. Yesterday I taught three songs by rote to a grade 3 class for their holiday concert. I had no problem singing in my head voice (to model singing in head voice for the students), and that whole class went really well. Although I haven't had time to work on the rep I've chosen to deal with, my singing is improving immensely and it's working great for the situation that I actually wanted to improve my singing for.

In other news, my practicum is also going really well. I do not want to leave my school at all and go back to classes. I'm loving teaching and my students as well.

Thanks for reading,
Trevor